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You know, parenthood can be spectacularly unsexy. Now, I’m sure there are people who would vehemently disagree with me on that statement — possibly while gesturing to the Sybian lurking in their hall closet, ready to erupt into full 120 RPM power as soon as the kids go down for their afternoon nap — but as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing like living with a toddler and an infant to really put a cramp in your style. I mean, there’s the spontaneity issue, or should I say lack thereof; there’s the issue of feeling physically drained after a day of dealing with pint-sized dictators; and as the mother of two boys, there’s a nontrivial amount of head-fuckery that goes on when you deal with miniscule penises all the time and you’re suddenly confronted with an adult-sized one. It’s like . . . well, it’s a little like seeing some kind of freaky, yet faintly comical space creature. Like something in the Mos Eisley Cantina.

(“Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Exotic Sex Toy and Nerdy Star Wars References, and we’d love to have this added to the group!”)

Plus, there is nothing, NOTHING that can kill a mood faster than hearing someone’s little sheep-bleat from the next room: “Eh-heh. Eh-HEH. EHHHH.” Hoo, boy. I suppose actually having a child barge into the room and demand to know why Daddy’s [REDACTED] is on Mommy’s [HILARIOUS EUPHEMISM] would be worse, but a baby’s cry is definitely like a Titanic’s worth of ice-water right on your privates.

It’s not all flaccidity and granny panties, of course, but these days when I think of the letter G I’m more apt to think of General Audience than spot, you know? The other day JB joked that while he’s out of town this week I should invite a girlfriend over to “help me out while he’s gone”, wink wink nudge nudge, and when I rolled my eyes and asked him who in hell he thought I could shanghai into pitching in with round-the-clock diaper changes he said no, not that kind of help, har de har hoo heh ha, and I was all, whatever with your stupid lesbo fantasy, dude, I’m staring down the barrel of another week of solo shit-shrapnel duty over here and my brain has no room for hot girl on girl action, not even if it was Angelina Jolie sporting those Tomb Raider thigh holster deals and a support team of French-speaking nannies.

A prime example of the effect parenthood can have on one’s sex life: while I laughed out loud at the scene in Burn After Reading when a Liberator sex wedge made its appearance (thus outing myself to the entire viewing audience as a person who recognized that triangular shape for what it was, which is to say, not a reflux pillow), my own personal Liberator sex wedge has been permanently repurposed as a children’s “slide”. Because once you’ve seen a toddler joyously rolling down the incline of a Liberator sex wedge, you can never really imagine it being used for any other activity ever again.

(At least I can say this has never happened in our house. Yet.)

The upside to being flattened under a daily tidal wave of unsexy domesticity is that the most boring things on earth are now profoundly pleasing to me. Fuck dirty talk, just tell me how you emptied the dishwasher. Oh yeah. Talk to me about how you did the laundry . . . oh! . . . and actually took clothes out of the dryer and put them away. Yes! Yes! YES! Ahhhh.

Riley has moved into a real, no-shit preschool class at his daycare and now instead of a little scribbled form saying he ate peaches at lunch and crapped at 3 PM, he gets this longish note listing off the various class projects he took part in. Lately, according to his note, he has been learning about calendars, talking about What Is My Favorite Pet?, writing numbers, and assembling paper bag puppets. This all sounds well and good, and whenever one of us picks him up, he’s always nose-deep in some activity (a great improvement over the 2-year-old classroom free-for-all that seemed to happen starting at 4:30 PM — probably couldn’t be helped given their age and the time of day, but I always felt like there was something a little feral about fifteen kids running around brandishing toys and yelling, like they could turn Lord of the Flies at any moment and start donning war paint, hunting pigs, and bashing each other with boulders), but ask him what he did during his schoolday and all he’ll say is, “Um . . . played with toys.” Press him for details and the answers are more than a little unreliable:

“Did you play with Legos?”
“Yeah!”
“Did you play with dynamite?”
“Yeah!”
“Did you play with the ancient ruins of an Indian graveyard, resulting in a horrific spiritual uprising complete with deadly clowns and swimming-pool skeletons, just like in Poltergeist?”
“YEAH!”

It’s funny, he routinely blows my mind by proving his memory can be downright eerily accurate (one crazy example: recently he asked if we “‘membered that Christmas tree at Uncle Joe’s house” — well, yes, there WAS a Christmas tree at Uncle Joe’s . . . TWO YEARS AGO), but either he’s got a secretive ‘what happens in preschool stays in preschool’ approach to how he spends his time three days a week, or those nice smiling teachers are actually pelting the children with leather whips all day long and he’s repressing all the painful memories.

Or, you know, he’s three, and basically as inscrutable as Britney Spears in her shaved-head, umbrella-wielding days. Most of the time I suspect his skull is stuffed with equal parts Profound Fathomless Knowledge and Limitless Potential — and a giant half-chewed wad of those orange candy circus peanuts.

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