Take me NOW

Now that Junior is almost a year old and I am returning to work, I’ve started doing some reflecting (in my spare time, haha) on the past year. It’s been joyous and redundant (sometimes joyous in its redundancy) and I wouldn’t change anything about it.

Except.

I realized that the only “me” activities (i.e., those I’ve done alone) have consisted of:

Laundry
Drinking
Washing bottles
Remembering to unclench my fists
Crying
Drinking
Finding myself humming “The Muffin Man”

After that dismal realization, I decided to take the sage advice of fellow moms, blah blah, and set aside more time for fun “me” activities. Like reading.

So the other night, after Junior had drifted off into his little world of slumber, I settled in to bed with a cup of Tension Tamer tea (cliché, I know, but the tea is dang good) and a new book, “Lost in the Forest,” by Sue Miller.

If you like the word “now” then you’ll love this book. The word appears about 8,987,678,678,564 times in 247 pages. As in, “Now Eva sits in her favorite chair. Now Mark looks at his foot. Now Daisy fixes her belt buckle. Now Frances hits her head against the wall.”

I was so enraged by the blatant overuse of the word I wanted to scream. But I pushed onward, determined to enjoy this luxurious fun “me” time.

Then I stumbled upon what is possibly the most vile, unappealing sex scene ever to appear in print. Ever. Let’s listen in as one of the main characters, Eva, reflects on the steamy sex she once had with her husband, Mark:

“She remembers it. It, and other times. Once when she was menstruating heavily and he had her on the kitchen counter, so that when he stood up to come into her, his face was violently smeared with blood.”

Ew, ew, ew, and ew again.

No hot sex scene should ever involve menstruation. If it’s not appealing in real life, it’s even less hot on the page.

Second, I really hope that that sexual encounter didn’t happen near dinner time because that counter probably needed a damn good cleaning. With bleach.

Third, is his smeared face supposed to denote some kind of extra-animalistic/savage tryst? Because there are other ways to convey that. Like having the man carry a bow and arrow or crudely fashioned spear while he mounts you. Or perhaps affixing a good old fashioned loin cloth right above his heaving genitals (see, even a few carefully placed adjectives are hotter than a menstrating hoo-hoo!).

For my next “me” activity I am going to throw up. Now.