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Be Careful What you Wish for.
Curiosity Killed the Cat.
Build it, they will come.
And so on and so forth forever into the dark, lustful night.

So, I am supposed to be folding clothes and mopping floors and washing dishes and domestic stuff like that. I am home with Silas whose nightmare cycle of illness has left all of us exhausted and weeping, begging God, if there is a God, that we’ll be his best friend if he would only spare us another blow-out diaper. Honestly, since he’s started day care, Silas has been well two days on and ten days off. Two days of laughing and outdoor play, ten days of screaming and drooling and throwing sippy cups at you. And the cycle repeats over and over and over and over again. Two and ten. Two and ten. It’s almost too much fun!

So, anyhow, I’m trying to get some of my more mundane duties out the way while he’s napping. But instead, I am compelled to write. I am so compelled because, despite the illness, today– oh peaceful, exhilarating today– has the feel of the olden days. The days of being a stay-at-home-mom. Days in which I was able to don my pajamas until 10, put Silas down for a nap and get in a good 20 minutes with the free weights, a quick, but luscious shower, a good half hour as a maid, another half an hour as a student, a final half an hour as an artiste, and a hike between naps. Oh, the good old days. How I lust after you.

In an effort to keep my sanity and my optimistic attitude (no, really, I have been optimistic), I’ve found my self slipping into deep, hypnotic daydreams of the past. These little abstractions started out innocently enough– a brief reverie of rocking in the glider feeding Silas and reading Fingersmith, a quick and gentle fantasy about a time before Silas could crawl– but quickly developed into something more dangerous.

I will openly admit, so that you don’t have to feel bad about yourself any longer, that I had begun indulging in delicious mind dramas about a life without children. A life in which catching a movie, sitting on the back deck with a book and a beer, and staying out until all hours of the night are not only daily occurrences but much taken for granted.

And, I didn’t stop there. I delved even deeper into the black cave of my imagination to uncover a fantastical dimension in which I was also unmarried, uncommitted, unattached and irresponsible. I saw myself as a winged bird in a leather mini with a cigarette dangling from my ruby red lips, flying from New Orleans to Las Vegas picking up men and dropping them along the way. As if that weren’t enough, I went even further: You got it! I started having waking dreams about certain passionate rendezvous from my past.

So, paint an A on my chest and call me dirty. But, on days and nights when the first time I get to sit down is when I drag myself and my vomit-soaked tee-shirt to bed at 10:30, it was my only recourse.

And, what happens in the red hot recesses of your mind stays in the red hot recesses of your mind. Right? Wrong.

As if I were a voodoo witch conjuring the devil up from beneath the floorboards, I managed to conjure an old, dead, wasn’t-even-ever-my-actual-boyfriend spirit back into my life.

How? you ask. What makes you capable of such perilous, mind-merging, seemingly superhuman feats? The answer is simple my friends: the G-D Internet. (Note again my use of abbreviated expletive. Pat on back. Thank you.)

So, somehow, one of those tipsy google searches that I mentioned in my last post ended up in a message on our answering machine. While I absolve myself of the psuedo-sin of actually contacting anyone from my less-than-wholesome youth, apparently, you no longer have to make actual contact to be scandalously found out. It seems that clicking on someone’s photo is enough to have you caught and trapped in your falsely secretive act of voyeurism. In the words of my husband as I type personal tidbits with the intent of posting them here, I must ask: Is nothing sacred anymore?

So, yes, the cats out of the bag: an old– I guess I’ll just throw it out there– lover left a message on our machine the other night. (Sorry, hon.) And I was faced with that incredibly awkward decision: to call or not to call.

I chose the latter.

But, in the spirit of compromise, I sent a brief email. And that is about all we wives and mothers can do with old flames.  (Thank God!)
So, when I found myself explaining to my calm, insightful, and understanding husband who it was exactly that left a message on our machine and why exactly he might have left it, I realized that I not only should be careful what I wish for (or dream about or conjure up with my witchly ways), but I should be setting my sights a little closer to home.

We need a friggin’ date!

Feel free to contact me if you would like to babysit.

Wait! Let me rephrase: If you and I have a current, platonic relationship and if you are responsible and good with children and if you don’t mind being paid with Malbec and a few hours enjoying our flat screen, then please contact me.

Former bedfellows need not apply.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Favorite Posts, On Friends and Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.