Finally, Someone Said It

So glad to see this in print. I agree with 98% of this. “Single, older women spell trouble for a man. In an extract from his new book, times2′s Microwave Man explains why. The chances are that if a reasonably attractive woman is single by her late thirties/early forties, then it is because at some point in the past she has hitched herself to a married man. It is quite amazing just how many otherwise sane, intelligent and self-aware women fall into this trap. What’s even more amazing is that they are then capable of maintaining the most extreme self-deception for years and years on end. (Of course, once you have the cats, you really are in trouble, caught in a Catch-22. You can’t get rid of them just because your love life picks up, but your love life is never going to pick up if you smell of cat wee. And, trust me, you will smell of cat wee.) Women who go through this process are ruined. No other man will want them because it will have reduced them to pitiful, bitter, angry, depressed, shrunken versions of the woman they once were, and could still have been. Besides, they won’t want other men: some part of them never quite let’s go of the hope — the belief — that, one day, he will come back to her (and stay longer than one night and some of the next morning). The fact that this happens to so many women surely gives the lie to all that bullshit about women being the superior, smarter, multi-tasking version of men. And the smarter the woman, the more likely she is to fall into the trap. It’s not just womens sensitivity and innate romantic inclination that is their undoing. She believes in herself so firmly that she finds it impossible to see how any man in his right mind couldn’t fall for her. And it’s about competition. Women, by and large, don’t have football, or darts, or video games to help them to blow off steam. As a result, they can’t just shag somebody else’s husband; they have to try to take him away from her. How many men do you know who have put their lives on hold in the hope that a married woman they are shagging will give up her hearth and home to be with them? That’s right, none. Because men, generally, have PlayStation’s. Men will never do this. They don’t have the patience, or the attention span (except for video games). A woman, on the other hand, is prepared to wait it out, to lay siege. She knows it won’t happen overnight so she gets in emotional supplies, a pile of weepy movies and microwave popcorn (and perhaps a self-help book or two) and digs in on the perimeter of the chosen man’s life. She has her friends to support her, but soon they get put off by the whiff of self-pity and the endless self-deception — not to mention the tedious, one-track conversations. The man’s not innocent, of course. He leads her on, of course; throws her scraps to feed the fantasy. He likes that when he turns up she is never up to her elbows in dirty dishes, never exhausted after a hard day and half asleep on the sofa, never in the middle of changing the bag in the Hoover or helping one of the kids with their bloody homework and never handing him the dog’s lead as he walks in. He likes that he can walk in and, if he feels like it (and he almost always does feel like it, because, let’s face it, that’s why he is there in the first place), lift her dress, pull her sexy panties to one side and do it hard and fast right there in the hallway, up against the wall, without any libido-sapping bikes or school bags or bloody dogs in his line of sight to put him off his stroke. And then, if he wants to rush away immediately afterwards, leaving her flushed and panting, to run back, wracked by guilt and self-loathing, to his wife and family, he can. He likes that too. And she, refusing to understand or recognise the guilt and self-loathing that rises in him even faster than the sap he has just expended, likes it too, because this is what she insists — to her own ruin — on mistakenly identifying as his unrestrainedly animal passion for her. And if you are one of these women, here’s a flash that (who knows?) might even be vivid enough to shock you out of your sleep-walking state. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Got enough biscuits? Okay, here it is: he will happily screw you but that doesn’t mean that he likes you very much. Physically, he probably doesn’t even find you that attractive (this won’t stop him wanting to shag you). He might even be embarrassed to be seen in public with you. Mentally, ditto. Personality, likewise. Well, I’m sorry, but I thought it best that you knew. For such a man, almost the worst aspect of his fear of being found out is the moment his wife claps eyes on her non-rival — and the extreme, weird depth of his perverse extramarital excursion is exposed in all its plain-Jane entirety. Most women would breathe a sigh of relief if they could see their “competitors”, and realise they are no more a rival than a blow-up doll would be. Perhaps less. But, actually, they wouldn’t. Like the women who are being screwed and who convince themselves that they are irresistible, the cheated-upon wives insist, perversely, on being convinced that there is something about the other woman that sets her above them, something that she has or does that makes her more attractive to their man than them. There isn’t. If there was, he would leave his wife for her. All the other woman has that the wife can never have is that she isn ’t his wife, his symbol of containment and of a closed-off, finished life. The other woman is, simply and crudely, a door left ajar, through which he almost certainly has no intention of passing. She is somebody different to shag, where the need to do so is driven not by an uncontrollably rampant libido but by a deeply located fear that This Is All There Is, the end of the line, and that the next stop can be only death. A woman has childbirth to sustain her. This, or even the notion of this, links her, mentally and physically, to the future. The child in her mind, in her womb, at her breast, at her feet, blocks the very possibility of the one question that sets men and women apart: what’s it all for? For a man committed emotionally and intellectually to one woman, that single question starts to bang away like a drum — softly at first but gradually louder and louder. Sex with other women, he comes to feel, is all that stands between him and the grave and the general and widely ignored futility of the human condition. Men see this futility clearer than women because their lives are more obviously futile. That’s why so many of them top themselves, for no apparent reason. For a man, an affair is, almost always, nothing to do with the woman involved. It’s not really anything to do with sex, either. It ’s about life and death. And that’s it, nothing more or less. I do hope we’re buying this. It’s regarded as a terribly empty and insulting platitude, but when a man utters the cliché “it meant nothing to me”, he means it, completely. Women refuse to accept this, perhaps because they can’t imagine being in that situation themselves without some form of emotional attachment, but a man is more than capable of having repeated, regular, illicit sex — risking losing the woman he loves and the family they have spawned — with someone he can, quite possibly, barely stand to be around. And you, sitting at home waiting for the call, keeping your weekends free in case he manages to escape one Saturday like he always promises he will but never quite manages to, you should know this: that it is quite probable that he doesn’t even like you very much. I mean, would you treat a friend the way he’s treated you? What turns him on is the power he has over you, the illicit nature of the relationship and the way it has of stopping him thinking about tomorrow. What sustains you through all those long, lonely, anxious, jealousy-riddled nights is the thought of the future you might, one day, have together. But can’t you see now how that’s never going to work? If he really cared about you, do you think he could bear to see you suffer? That’s why he always goes back to his wife. He loves her, and he couldn’t bear to see her suffer. Your suffering, however — no problem. He doesn’t set out to be cruel, but sooner or later he will tell her he loves her (because, after a while, it just gets embarrassing if you don’t) and, once she starts putting on the pressure, he will say almost anything to forestall the dawning of reality. He is torn because although he can see that he is becoming everything to this woman (and he, of course, has absolutely no intention of leaving his wife and family), part of him has become addicted to the snatched, sordid, heavy-breathing sex and the endless, filthy e-mails and text messages that bring him to the boil when he is sitting at his desk and should be concentrating on whatever it is someone is paying him to concentrate on. And he is attracted to the danger because it makes him feel alive. The Other Woman is, of course, always a willing co-conspirator in her own downfall. Tough, grown-up, educated, discerning and smart in every other area of her life, she becomes a helpless, malleable, gullible dunderhead who will believe any transparent lie rather than accept that the world view she has constructed is nothing more than a fantasy, and that she, to her married man, is nothing more than a fantasy. And so on and on she drones to her friends . . How do I know all this? How do you think? And let me take this opportunity right now to say . . . sorry, but what the hell did you expect? Men know women like this on sight. They can recognize them. At work, in bars, passing on the street, reading self-help books on the Tube and hanging around wistfully in the tumbleweed-blown sections of bookshops everywhere. The bitter aura of their disappointment clings to them like a noxious gas; the underlying fairytale that, despite all she has suffered and should have learnt from, there will be a happy ending, clanks at her feet like a rusty ball and chain. Men can smell it and hear it and they avoid them like the walking dead because there is nothing less attractive than a woman who has so utterly and obsessively surrendered herself. What a sad sight is the Other Woman. At times (usually the times when she’s hit the Pernod and cranked up the Dido) it seems that her only friend is the cat. And then, just the other day, as I glanced in irritation at my mobile phone, and the text message telling me that my expected Saturday morning dalliance was off, it suddenly occurred to me. I am the Other Woman. Well, the Other Man, obviously. But it got me thinking. What is the difference between me and the popular stereotype above, and should I start reading self-help books with such titles as Why All Women Are Bastards — and How to Get One of Your Own? The first thing, I suppose, is a question of quantity over quality. I have had one or two (OK, four or five) relationships with happily married/boyfriended women (occasionally, more or less simultaneously), and I suppose the effect of this has been to dilute my emotional and/or physical reliance on any one of them. And then I haven’t exactly been moping around, polishing my nails and preening my bikini line, waiting for any of them to leave their partners. One of the drawbacks of being the male equivalent of The Other Woman is that one doesn’t get showered with chocolates, jewelery and flowers. On the other hand, there are no empty promises sought, or given, about her leaving him once the kids are grown up. (And a heads-up for the sisters here: it should be a red light with klaxons, bells and slaps around the face for any woman whose lover claims to be staying with his wife solely for the kids. It is almost certainly rubbish and you are, as the rest of us already know, merely a bit on the side. And if it is true, then he’s not right in the head. Anyone that dependent on his children for his own happiness is heading for disillusion. Don’t go there with him.) Love, as the great and tragically under-rated psychosexual philosopher and poet-balladeer Belinda Carlisle once observed, is a big scary animal. How very true. And it’s a big scary animal that requires constant feeding. Rather like Tiddles. If you insist on climbing into the cage with the beast, be prepared to feed it often, or it will start feeding on you. And if love doesn’t get you, Tiddles surely will. Lose the cat. And the wee-soaked litter tray.

Mom Of The Year

PSA time people.  Smoking.  It's the most uneducated thing you could possibly do at any point in your life. Today the kids saw all these cigarette butts in a puddle outside the Corcoran and they repeatedly asked what they were. I realized they haven't been exposed to the cancer sticks because their parents don't allow it and we aren't friends with any smokers.  We know how uneducated and harmful it is.  We would never expose them to the harmful second hand smoke. Then as luck would have it, a preggers walked by smoking.  I had to restrain myself from screaming "thanks for ensuring your baby is more likely to get an pneumonia!  That's really considerate and selfless of you!"  As much as pregnant woman are not public property and should not be told what to do, this is the one issue that really burns my blood.  How can anyone have so little common sense?

http://www.pinterest.com/xtracycledc/mom-of-the-year/

Terminal Sadness

When you have 16 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, you are grateful that you can afford to take them. But secretly the whole time, you are very aware of what day it is and how much longer you have left of this precious, precious time to actually be a mom everyday, all day. To know the ins and outs of all the things happening in your child's life. To see every smile, every tear, every tantrum. To hear every coo, every new word, every "conversation" with Elmo in their crib.

I have a little less than two weeks until my 16 weeks are up. I feel terminally sad at all I am going to miss in their lives, all that I will not see everyday, and all that they will miss receiving from me. Because as much as having a wonderful nanny is wonderful, it's never the same as having the parent there. We are blessed to have the most wonderful nanny on Capitol Hill, and I think of her like a second mom, but still, I yearn to be there. I yearn to be the one raising my kids.

When my daughter was born, I took 7 weeks off and returned to work. When my son was born, I took 16 weeks. This second maternity leave is the most amount of time I have ever spent with my daughter and I have to say, she is really pretty awesome and blossoming into an amazing toddler everyday. I learn something from her or about her everyday. Little details that only the person closest to her will get to see or know everyday. Like today, for instance, when I caught her telling Elmo "night night" and tucking him in in her crib when I put her down for a nap. These sweet, uninterrupted, intimate moments captured on the video monitor for only me to see. I know her scent, and I can smell it before I even open the door to her room. I know how it feels when I embrace her when she is happy and how it feels when I embrace her when she is sad or scared or crying. I now know this child.

My son is a wonderfully bright baby of 3 1/2 months. His smile delights me. His coos and aaahhs thrill me. I know the difference between his hungry cry, his wet cry and his overtired cry. I can't imagine that anyone will be able to help him explore the world in the same way that I could, if I could afford to stay home. I can't imagine how different it will be in two weeks when he is in his exersaucer learning how to bounce and I am not there to cheer him on. Will he know what an accomplishment he has made? Will he know that I am proud of him and that I love him?

It sounds ridiculous I am sure. But it's hard. It's like an emotional tusnami. You don't know that this is how you are going to end up feeling until you are at the point of no return. I love my kids deeply. So much that it hurts. They are my heart walking around outside of my body.


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Location:My Heart

Toilet Paper, And Please Overnight It, Thanks.

Is it pathetic that I just ordered a 12 pack of toilet paper on amazon.com? It's only Monday of this week and already it feels like the to do list is piling up. My husband informed me that we might need toilet paper. *Might* because usually he tells me we need something - "We need mayonnaise," and generally that is because he hasn't "really" looked for the thing he is telling me we need. Everyone knows that most of the time if you move a few items in the fridge, like say the gallon container of milk, you will find what you are looking for. Also, anything he ever seems to need or think we are out of is generally found in close proximity to the ketchup. So tonight, as I double checked is toilet paper request, I find that he is correct. We do need toilet paper. There is none in the storage closet, and alas, there is none next to the ketchup.

This is significant to me on many levels. To my husband, it is significant on only one level: He is right. For me, I am the person that comes home from Target or the grocery store with 100 items more than I went for because I had a coupon and these 100 items, unbeknownst to me prior to arriving to the store, were actually on sale while I was there. I cannot resist the temptation to get a good deal and stock up ahead of time. I've never been sorry that I've had 68 rolls of paper towels in my itty bitty storage closet on Capitol Hill. In fact, I've usually been more amazed at how quickly these mundane items get depleted. Once I was actually sure that the nanny MUST be taking some of these items for her own house. Thus, for me to not have at least one pack of toilet paper in the entire house, and for me to not know this ahead of time, well folks, it's just simply amazing.

So, until the order from amazon.com shows up on my door step tomorrow, we'll all be using baby wipes. That is, unless I am almost out of those too.


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Location:Capitol Hill, Washington, DC

A fabulous freak

I'm back. We are somewhere around 36 weeks pregnant with our second. He is apparently a freak who at 34 weeks weighed in womb what his sister weighed at 39 1/2 weeks outside of the womb. Perhaps he will be 6'4" like his daddy, at birth, with a full head of hair and all of his teeth. I love him to death already but yes, he is fabulously freaky. He looks like a basketball in my shirt. People ask "when are you due?" with that weird look in their eyes like they think I might say "last month.".


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Location:The womb

Ch.Oga

Ch.Oga. Chair Yoga.
I went to do a Ch.Oga class at the gym this morning. The description online says this:
"Take Urban Yoga with a chair and you have Ch.oga."
Ok, sounds like something that would be OK for someone who is 21 weeks pregnant. The prenatal yoga DVD I have at home uses a chair for some of the poses, so this makes sense.
Um...I was the youngest person in the class by 40 years, besides the instructor. I walked in an thought I was at the Silver Sneaker Workout Class, which is tomorrow at the same time. Maybe I got my days mixed up? Nope, one 88 year old man that likes to "remain active" let me know, this was definitely Ch.Oga. So, that's how my morning started. I actually enjoyed geriatric yoga and found it to be the perfect fit for me at this stage in my pregnancy. I'm going back next week, and maybe I'll even make some friends.

Is 40 weeks 10 months?

So, I am having a problem understanding this whole pregnancy thing being 40 weeks. Isn't 40 weeks actually 10 months, not 9 months? Was my high school health teacher completely wrong? At 21 weeks...yes, I have been thinking about this for a long time, I have had an epiphany. For those of you who don't want to calculate the Lunar cycle and how old the egg is verses how far along you are in your pregnancy, behold, I have a new way to understanding the 40 weeks. Are you ready? Here it is:



52 weeks in the year minus 40 weeks = 12 weeks.

12 weeks = 3 months, therefore, 40 weeks = 9 months



This is the best I can come up with.