Juggling

I’m far more proud of my ability to withstand privation. I feel like a bad mom when I get a babysitter for my teething, miserable child so that I can do something personal, and he cries piteously to see me leave (granted, if he cried for more than a couple of minutes, I wouldn’t leave him with a sitter…I would come back).

And then there are those times my need for a lover addles my brain so that I can’t focus on work, can’t be present to Isaac. It’s those times I’m so horny I could chew through nails, and it is only 10 minutes later that I realize I’ve been lost in a fantasy and don’t know what’s on the computer screen in front of me or what Isaac is doing putting my glasses into the trash can.

I frequently feel desperate about this juggling act I’m in, including juggling my need to be in a committed relationship and my need for sex. It’s not just one need that calls to me, unmet, but a whole constellation of them. This is one. And I’m not sure how it would even look to reveal that desperation, that longing. I guess I’m much more comfortable saying to my friends, “I need to find work that fulfills me and is life-giving to me,” while inside I’m thinking that then I’ll have the energy to date and the money for babysitters so I can spend time with myself and with an adult partner, and enough time after work is done for the day that sex won’t seem like an unaffordable luxury, something I pay for with lack of sleep or shorting my work or at the expense of my precious time alone.

I met a guy this summer whom I dated briefly. I’ll admit that it was on the first date that I ravished the man. It had been six months since I’d been with anyone, and I was hungry to be bodies with someone at last. He asked me later if I am that open and loving with everyone. And I had to take pause at his question. With everyone? Was he wondering if he was one in a line of thousands who got to be the recipient of my sexual favors? If every day I met someone and took them home and brought them into my bed? I don’t know that I ever did answer his question. But perhaps that’s the way I express my desperation from time to time – in being just a little too open when I have the opportunity, and leaping to a point in the relationship that the relationship cannot support.