Teaser

You may or may not have noticed, but I do maintain some personal boundaries as far as blogging goes. In writing about my family, I try to balance my urge to chronicle our life together with their inalienable right to privacy and my obligation to respect it. For example, I will never make public any part of our lives that takes place on the toilet (if it is still happening in a diaper, that is fair game, though). Nor will I vent here about marital conflicts, no matter how much better it would make me feel to hear from you that indeed, I am right, and he could not be more wrong.

The blog boundaries are somewhat tighter than those for my non-fiction for print. My burgeoning manuscript of essays includes a number of pieces that don't go on the blog, because I hope the people who eventually read those will be intentional readers. I realize this includes most of you, but I also get an alarming number of visitors to the blog who arrive by way of google search terms rottweiller-daschund mix and are not necessarily sympathetic to my innermost musings on life.

One of these pieces, coming out this summer in a smallish religious magazine, is about us working through a difficult time in our marriage a number of years back. I didn't think twice about letting the publisher, a friend, have it. But last week I saw the proofs, and I confess I felt a wave of queasiness when I realized thousands of people were about to be privy to one of our less-than-finer moments.

Another, as-yet-unpublished, essay is a fairly bawdy expository on sex after kids. An excerpt:

We actually own a book of scripted lovemaking, called 101 Nights of Great Sex, to help with the failures of erotic imagination that kick in somewhere around the 1000th diaper change mark. The book has tear-out pages with detailed instructions for getting it on more creatively. I bought it after our second son turned a year old. We thought the baby years were mostly behind us and that it might be safe to get back in the water. We have been frugal with it, like survivors on a lifeboat with the last tin of hard biscuits. By my reckoning, ninety-five nights of great sex are still up for grabs. At this rate, I figure we can look forward to one or two a year well into our retirement.

No, that's not the bawdy part, but that's all you get, internet! For one thing, the piece is about 2,000 words long. For another, it feels weird to with post details of our sex life online. If it's bound and printed, I can tell myself (and my mom) I did it for Literature. I know, I am thirty-seven years old, married, with three children, conceived the usual way. You and my mom have probably figured out that I have done IT (but in case she hasn't, don't tell her, will you?).

All of which is to say, I have decided NOT to blog about our hilarious, hot "date" with the pay per view channels last night while the kids were at a sleepover. Sorry to be a big tease. But that unpublished essay is about to get five hundred words longer.

And I have got to work in a quote from a lovely, older couple who attended a relationships workshop with us in our church several years ago, when they volunteered that they had tried the suggested "homework assignment" to experiment with open-eyed love making.

"Is there anything you want to share about it?" the workshop leader asked.

"Just that at our age, you have really got to balance the openness of your eyes with the dimness of the lighting."

Tell me about it.

Hey, stick around this week. Something very exciting is about to happen.