Hoosiers Ate My Brain

Marybeth on Sex in the City

One of my favorite SF friends, fellow Anna Nicole Smith fan and Korean BBQ eater, Mary Elizabeth Willilams is now an intrepid New Yorker along with all its perks -- and, well, downsides. With two fabulous babies and one tiny apartment she hilariously tells us in the NY Observer about trying to have sex with her husband, her former sex-pot self and longing for sex on a washing machine. Well, longing for sex...and a washing machine.

I’m having an affair with my husband. Ever since we became parents, the operative word for our sex life is "furtive." We’re sneaking around, exchanging coded phone calls and hush-hush quickies. I haven’t had to work this hard to score since the SAT’s. Friends with sprawling suburban abodes have bedrooms to themselves, bedrooms that maybe even lock. We, on the other hand, have two doors in our whole Carroll Gardens apartment. One leads to an impossibly tiny bathroom, the other to the hall. Neither is particularly helpful in getting me any play. Our 5-year-old sleeps in a small room directly off ours, where painted hinges are all that remain to remind us of the time something sturdier than a flimsy, shabby-chic-from-Target drape once hung. The baby rests, often fitfully, in the crib a few feet from our bed. And a white-noise machine delivers a whoosh of sound rarely found outside international airports.

Like most urban parents, the sleep of our children is a fragile, easily disturbed and deeply precious commodity. There are few things in life we cling to with such desperation as that brief window of time each night after our kids conk out but before we go to bed. We have neighbors who live with their twins in a one-bedroom and sleep on a futon, colleagues whose erratic schedules made hooking up a challenge even before they had kids. They say every child is a miracle. Now I know that’s because sex is damn near impossible.

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posted by braingirl @ 5:24 PM