Brunette Stripped Bare

I often say that I don’t feel terribly grown-up.

I do grown-up things. I’m married. I’ve bought new cars. I’ve bought houses. I work full-time, get promoted, am given responsibility at work. I’ve gone on holidays to foreign countries, without supervision. I contemplate having children in the next couple of years, and so it goes on… all very grown-up activities, but still I sometimes feel like a child playing pretend.

Don’t get playing pretend confused with being unhappy. All of the things I do and participate in make me happy or content in some way. It just doesn’t seem real sometimes. I find it hard to put my finger on the feeling, find it hard to articulate exactly what causes me to feel that way. Because it’s so difficult, I don’t know whether the feeling will ever go away.

Am I crazy? Does anyone else feel this way? Maybe only being a parent will make that feeling go away. Or perhaps even then I’ll occasionally feel like I’m watching the scene from the sidelines as I change my own child’s nappy, almost like an out-of-body experience… whilst thinking to myself “Which crazy bastard gave her a child?! She’s still a kid inside herself!”

Something, can’t really say what, has inspired me lately to go into a bit of a catch-up frenzy. I’m really enjoying myself! Recently I have gone on a girl’s weekend away down south (wineries, gourmet food - it’s a gutso’s heaven down there) with my oldest friends. So fun! So much so, that we were all frantically emailing each other Monday morning saying what a good time we had and we really need to do it more often… and we meant it! It was the most refreshing and honest two nights I have ever spent with these girls and I LOVED it. I had forgotten what great friends I have. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in your life, your job, your partner, and eventually your children that it’s easy to lose touch with people, even if you see them on a sort-of regular basis. It seems like half the time you meet up but come away knowning nothing new or different about them. It was awesome to come away feeling like you have reconnected and really know these people you have called your friends for so, so many years (15 years, some of them!). It was also massively hilarious to reminisce about high school and early clubbing days and what not… we really did have some adventures, and now we’re all so grown-up and boring there is simply no way we will ever experience that many things, and know anyone in our lives again the way we know each other.

Because there was so much fun and frivolity to be had with that group of friends, I think it pushed me to get in contact with other friends of mine. I have a habit of finding an older woman at each of my jobs to be my ‘mother-figure’, my mentor if you will. Because of my recent catch-up frenzy, I’ve felt the compulsion to catch-up with my two confidantes from my previous jobs - I hadn’t seen them in so long… plus I knew they’d always be up for some news from me anyway. I’ve enjoyed it so much, loved getting things off my chest, loved listening to how they and their families are going, it’s just been brilliant. Why did I leave it so long to get in touch and reconnect?

Bit like this blog really…

This is the exact kind of joy I want to get out of my children someday. Not just the first smile, the first steps… but the endless amusement they can provide too.

http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000749.php

RAISINS?!?

I swear, I have listened almost 400 times and it’s STILL funny!

My husband and I have had a number of conversations lately about simply packing up our lives and ‘running away’ from everything and everyone we know.

It makes me wonder about the logisitics of actually doing something like that. We are established here. We live in a town we’ve both lived in since Primary School, the husband has lived here his whole lifetime. Our immediate families all live within 45minutes drive of our house. We have permanent, well-paying jobs and a mortgage that depends upon these jobs. As much as people tell us otherwise, we are getting older, maybe even ‘too old’ for that sort of thing - we’re at the point in our lives where we’re really thinking about having children in the next few years. Besides, where would we go? What would we do when we got there? How long would we go for? What would happen to our ’stuff’? How would we support ourselves while we were away? I’m too useless for hard labour (no seriously. I can admit my flaws).

I feel really torn between a massive, enormous, life-changing adventure and the life we have worked so hard to build. At the end of the day, my logical mind knows it’s all just ’stuff’ - the cars, the house and everything within it. But my logical mind also knows that one day I will want children, and children need just that. A home to live in. A car to transport them to doctors appointments. Money to put food in their mouths. I want all that for myself too! Could we just give all that away and be confident that the world will provide us with another opportunity to build all that again?

I realised recently that I have completely forgotten how to flirt! I’m not sure when this happened, because I have definite, real memories of flirting with other guys since being together with my now-husband (around seven years now). I don’t think it happened when we got married either, it seems like much longer than a year since I’ve had a good flirting session.

I just don’t know how this could’ve happened. I used to be such a super-flirt. I was good at it. There are literally two guys who can I think of who I’ve wanted and never managed to ’snag’. But I got pretty damn close. Both have since admitted they did want me at the time, but didn’t want to ruin a friendship. Even after I got together with my husband, it didn’t stop me. I don’t see flirting as a big deal, it’s not a relationship breaker. I think people operate better in their relationships when they feel wanted and feel sexy… even if they’re getting that boost, that ‘oompf’ from outside the relationship.

I think that I may have put the brakes on my flirting habit when I felt it was getting out of hand. I remember going to a party when one of the guys mentioned above arrived. He’d been overseas for a couple of years, so it was a big shock to everyone to see him there. He was definitely improving with age. The little ‘zing’ for me was still there, but I was taken. Really taken! But I still didn’t want to see him with anyone else, that would just ruin the night and make me jealous! I could see a few others around the room eyeing him off, so I felt I needed to do something about it.

 So I did what I knew best… I flirted outrageously. We were buried deep in conversations about travel, family, life in general. It was as though the other 30-40 people at the house party we were at didn’t exist - he was interesting and interested in me, too. Things were going swimmingly until I went to the bathroom and came across a couple of other girls. “Things seem to be going well between you and OverseasBoy”. Eyebrows were raised. They knew I was taken, and the eyebrows are making more of a statement than their words ever could. I laughed, and spoke the truth, “If I can’t have him, nobody can”. Something flashed across the girls faces, and I knew I would be gossiped about later. I had totally just pissed off the sisterhood!

 Thinking about it later, I was so ashamed of myself. Not for talking to him, not for flirting with him… but about not letting others talk or flirt with him! The fact that I made it all about me, made me think I had crossed the line and gone too far. It wasn’t harmless fun, there must’ve been a definite attraction there for me to act like that. It made me uncomfortable, and it made me feel guilty, like I really had been doing the wrong thing by my now-husband. I think this may have been the beginning of the end of my talent as a flirter-extraordinare.

How many of you ‘taken’ ones out there still give your flirting skills a regular workout?

 *10 points for whoever identifies that movie quote.

Oh, and this is already working! We can’t believe it… it’s making me so happy. And horny.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be horny more than once a week.

Once a upon a time, I wanted sex all the time. I would only have to think about sex and there would be that dull ache in the sweetest of spots, anticipating what was to come (’scuse the pun). I’d always heard that a woman’s sexual peak arrives much later than a man’s (I think late-30’s for women vs. late teens for men), however that didn’t seem to be true for me. Whilst not wildly promiscuous, I was in no way a prude either and as long as there was an attraction there, I was up for it. The fact that I was on The Pill only made life easier - no need to worry about the condom breaking, as there was always a safety net anyway. No worry about pregnancy = free abandon in the bedroom. Or the car. Or at the beach. Basically, wherever the mood struck. 

Sex was good with my then-boyfriend, now-husband from the beginning. I was his first, and I have moulded him to be my ideal lover, hopefully I have done the same for him. He was and still is, teh hotness. My type completely… tall, broad shoulders, dark hair, dark eyes, quiet and shy… delicious. But for some reason, the sex+us equation was starting to not add up. For one, we were having sex a lot less. And I was the problem. I never initiated sex, and when he did I either refused altogether, or simply obliged. But he and I could both tell it was becoming just that - an obligation. My vajeeen (thank you Borat) just didn’t want to come to the party. Not exactly what we envisaged for the next 50+years of our lives!

The kick up the arse for me came when my husband revealed his concerns for our marriage. While everything else about our marriage is literally perfect, it seems pretty empty without regular sex, particularly in your mid-20’s with no children, and therefore, no excuses! We have often said that we are each other’s best friend, but he was concerned we were becoming just that - best friends, not husband and wife. I started assessing where we could be going wrong.

After doing some research, it seems that the very thing that initially gave me sexual freedom may now be taking it away. The Pill. The secret libido killer, ruining marriages the world over. There is anecdotal evidence that The Pill is responsible for lowering the libido of millions of women, particularly after long-term use. I have been on it for around 10 years. Long-term enough for you?

So, I made the difficult decision to try life without The Pill for the first time in my adult life. I have many concerns. Pregnancy, acne, the size of my boobs (if they get any itty-bitty’er, I might as well be 9 years old). I can deal with these worries if it means making my husband (and me!) more satisfied. But I think the scariest thing of all is the ‘what if’? What if it doesn’t work? What does it it mean for ‘us’?

I’m not really sure where I got to or why I left this blog alone for so long. I’ve had a couple of blogs in the past where my anonymity was put at risk, where I probably released a little too much information. When creating this blog, I was deliberately vague (I don’t think I’ve even mentioned which country I live in) because I really felt I wanted to get some things off my chest and be as open as possible. Looks as though I didn’t have as much to get off my chest as I thought! I seemed to run out of steam. I think I’ve slowly come around to the fact that I don’t necessarily need to reveal anything shocking or ‘out there’ about myself to be interesting.. but at the same time, I’m all about quality rather than quantity. I don’t think I ever want to become one of those bloggers who goes on about what I had for breakfast just to keep people coming through the door. I want the blog to be for me, and if some readers identify with what I have to say… then, awesome.