The Secret Confessions of a Horny House Wife

I’m in a group of twelve very close girlfriends.  We all have three-year-old children.  We were sitting around one recent night, talking, laughing, eating, drinking (and I mean drinking), and telling mommy-hood war stories.  One of my girlfriends who has a three-year old daughter told a really interesting one:

Each night my friend reads her daughter a princess story.  (They have a set of twelve.)  Each book ends with the princess “falling in love with the prince.”  The other night, after finishing their nightly princess story, my friend’s daughter looked at her with concern in her eyes and asked, “Mommy, why do the princesses always fall?” 

Our Mommy round-table, usually loud and rowdy, fell into a stunned silence, as each woman considered her own history of nasty spills.  And suddenly I saw the history of my own adult life as a series of tumbles I’ve taken, tripping from man to man.  Up, then down, then up again.  I bruise my knee.  I blacken my eye.  I bump my funny bone. 

Falling can be risky.  You don’t know where or when you’ll land, and you might hit someone else on your descent.  Or, you could land on something breakable, like a heart.

But falling can be thrilling, too.  It’s exciting to feel the wind on your face and the “woosh” in your ears.  There’s no view like the one from way up high, as you plummet towards the earth, where all “falls” into love inevitably finish.  

But the adrenalin of the fall is a high you can become addicted to, and so you have to be careful.      

I thought about the constant free fall I’ve been in for the past few months: Curt, Dave, James for a micro-second, and now Sergeant Shane.  I also thought about my life’s history of falling, always from one man to the next, without any break in between.  I’ve often felt like Tarzan, swinging from vine to vine through the jungle, except I swing from man to man.  And before I quite let go of one man, I’m reaching out to grab at the next. 

It was the day after I heard the “falling” story that I took my profile off the Married-People-Cheating website.  It just stopped feeling fun, and started feeling like masochism.  I decided that, for a while, I’m going to make a vowel change.  I’m going to take a break from “falling in love” and I’m going to begin “feeling in love.”   

I’ll feel Curt and I’ll feel Dave and Sergeant Shane and my son and my husband and my friends and my family.  And instead of obsessing over the feat of falling, of acquiring, of getting, I’ll relish the sensation of the love I have, because sometimes the having is better than the getting, and the landing is better than the fall.