Side-By-Side, by Courtney Brooks

(Courtney is a teacher in New York City, and a student in Janice's private writing class. Her blog is here.)

Side-By-Side

It was supposed to be a nice little quickie before bed. 

We hadn’t had sex in weeks.  Maybe months.  Our once active and surprisingly exciting sex life had long since been replaced by progesterone creams, hormone shots, medication schedules, enlarged ovaries, IVF’s, inseminations and negative pregnancy tests. 

My blood test was scheduled for the next morning although we both already knew that our IVF had failed so it was odd that the mood struck me that night.  My first inclination was to let the feeling pass but I couldn’t justify squandering such an opportunity.  My wife was quick to agree and followed me into the bedroom.

We undressed silently in the dark room.  There was no ceremony to it, just a sense of urgency, a need to act before it was too late.  We slid into bed, her hands on my hips, mine in her hair, kissing tentatively, almost cautiously.  Marie whispered, “Do you want to be on top?”  I didn’t.  I asked her if we could “do it side-by-side,” our term for mutual masturbation.  She agreed and moved her body close to me. 

We lay there in the dark, moaning softly.  Our bodies pressed up together so that we could feel each other grinding and thrusting.  My wife began to breathe faster and her moans grew higher and louder as she reached orgasm.  I always love listening to my wife come.  I rocked my own hand a little faster, starting to reach a crescendo as well.  We came together my loud and low moaning mixed with her high soft cries of release. 

From the satisfied throbbing between my legs, a hunger spread.  I had to come again.  Arching my back, grinding my hips into the bed, I panted and shuddered.  How long had it been since I touched myself?  I couldn’t remember. 

Climaxing again, I felt my wife’s thrusts as she came too.  It wasn’t enough.  The bed squeaked along the hardwood floor, as I fucked myself wildly, almost angrily.  I used to do this all the time.  I used to be young and alive. I used to fuck my wife passionately.  We used to make love every night, howling like two wolves. 

I came again, tears streaming down my face but I couldn’t stop.  I fucked myself as hard as I could, gasping, growling, at the indignity of getting old before my time. I used to be toned and sexy.  I had energy and drive. We used to role-play, we used to have fun, she used to dress me up and I’d be her slave or her whore.  I used to be confident enough to be submissive.  Now I was fucking myself like a rapist trying to prove his manhood.  I came again and again and again, a snarling riptide of orgasms as I dominated my barren, useless, flabby body. 

I felt my wife roll toward me and rub my ass...a sign that she was finished.  I wasn’t.  Savagely, I jerked my hand between my legs.  Tears mixed with sweat on my face and the sheets beneath my thighs were slick from my efforts.  I came one last time, roaring for the woman I was a year ago and sobbing for the husk I have become.

Limply, I laid my head down and tried to control my trembling, grateful for the dark room that hid the tears.  My wife rubbed my back lightly.  “What got into you?”  Thankfully, my vocalizations had masked the sobbing.

“Nothing.” I replied.  “I just was really horny.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

We lay there for a few minutes.  I tried my best to act normally, playfully nipping her fingertips as she reached for my hand but awkwardness was building. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I lied. “I think I lost my estrogen patch in the bed.”

Journal Writing for People Who Hate Journal Writing

Welcome to the second not-quite-weekly installment of our new group advice column, Help A Sister Out, also known as Hayso. This week's email comes from G. in New York City:

As "a writer," I know I am supposed to keep a journal, and I sort of do, but I hate writing in it. Because I don't write in it very often, when I do, I feel weird, and I don't know where to start, or who I'm supposed to be talking to. And I hate looking at the things I've written in the past, I hate the way I sound, I'm so whiny and boring. Basically, my journal stinks like failure and I never want to pick it up again.

Great! Excellent, well said. My journal, too, stinks like failure -- whenever I flip back and read old entries, I am struck by two things: 

1. How much of an idiot I was even two weeks ago; how little I knew then compared to what I know now, and how acutely aware I am that I don't know shit right now compared to what I'm going to know in two weeks.

2. I can't remember what the second one was. Probably not important.* Oh yeah! How boring and whiny I am, and how redundant and unoriginal.

(2a. * Now I remember. When I look back, I see all the projects I thought of and ideas I had and stories I wrote that went nowhere, seriously nowhere. [And yet, they had to be written too.])

(2b. Also, when I flip through the book to get to the next empty page, I catch just enough of what I've been up to recently that it's like watching a flip-book stick figure dancing in the margins, a cartoon cow, or a skeleton, or a cow skeleton. Anyway.)

So, yes, depressing. Which is why I don't reread my old entries. I just fill notebook after notebook, and file them in a box in the closet. If I have to find something for reference later, it's there, amidst the banal details of life: "Have to pick up birth control and sunscreen. Think I might be done with this relationship." But most of it is unimportant shit. That's why it goes in the notebook.

The stuff you write in your notebook is not something that's going to be published someday. It's not something you're going to read out loud. It's the shit that's in the way between you and your deeper ideas. It's grudges and lusts and petty bullshit, and griping about how hungry and tired you are; it's anxieties and frustrations, and it's no wonder you hate it, because it's a mirror of life, and if you don't hate life sometimes, you're not paying attention. 

Conversely, if you don't love life sometimes, you're really not paying attention. The notebook gives you a chance to do that too. I know how Oprah this sounds, but writing things you're grateful for, things you want to come true, things you would like to believe -- it helps. It's hard to write affirmations, but it's great exercise, and when you're stuck for a subject, thinking of the people and things that you're grateful for is a practice that increases your mental well-being.

And you're talking to yourself, in the moment, that's who you're talking to. Confidentially, just you and you, the real deal that you wouldn't share with anyone else, not in its entirety. (Note: Mine are to be burned after my death, if not before.) Which reminds me: You have to have real privacy to keep a journal -- if you have a suspicion that it might get read, you will not be able to be honest with yourself on the page. 

Finally, don't think you have to write for a long time, or every day -- that's ideal, but it's not necessary. Five minutes on the subway is better than no minutes. Get to a bar early? Pull out your notebook instead of your phone (so much sexier). Start with the date and time and your immediate surroundings, or the first thing on your mind, and just do a little bit. Ease into it. It's like exercise. If you haven't been to the gym in a while, then you go and you overdo it and you hurt yourself, you never want to go back. So just move the pen around, let it say what it has to say, then close the book on it.

Those of you who keep journals, how do you do it? Literally: how often, what do you write about, and how do you keep it up? All supportive and constructive advice welcome!

Ouch

I got excited this weekend, because I got this thing called kinesio tape applied to my arms, and it gave my hands and arms the first relief from pain I've had in six weeks, if not three years, and the first thing I did was a bunch of writing and answering email, and now they hurt again. 

The universe is telling me to shut up.

What do me and Dana Piccoli and Lady Gaga have in common?

Oh, just EVERYTHING.

 
 

Me and Dana on our way to the Gaga show at MSG on Friday. As Bill said on Facebook, "They're chaperoning age-appropriate kids to the concert. Such nice girls." 

What an inspired and inspiring show -- even before the show started. Her opening act, Semi-Precious Weapons, was a band she used to play with years ago at bars just blocks away, when twelve people would show up, something the front man announced with glee to the 10,000 people packing the place. And before her set, she screened a PSA about the link between teenage homelessness, homophobia, and domestic violence:

She gave a number where people donating that night could text their pledges. And later in the show -- after a virtuoso performance, with her leg up on the piano's keyboard, of "Speechless" (which she dedicated to her dad, "who drinks too much! But if I didn't have all these alcoholic assholes in my life, I wouldn't write such great songs."), and her new song, "You and I" -- she called one of the people in the stadium who'd texted their five bucks. The cameras showed it to be a seventeen-year-old girl with Diet Coke cans in her hair, who was so thrilled and overcome, I (OF COURSE, because I'm fifty, and going through menopause) started to cry.

The entire show was an extravaganza of over-the-top stagecraft, fabulous choreography, and really beautiful singing. (And crazy drunk girls from New Jersey, who nearly barfed on us in the scrum caused when MSG downgraded everyone's awesome floor seats to not-awesome floor standing.) I not only love Lady Gaga, I flove her.

And I flove that she is saying something that Dana and I (and many, many others) have been trying to tell people for a while, which is that a lot of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered kids are homeless because of homophobia. I would estimate the number of such kids at the shelter where I volunteered to be twenty-five to thirty percent of the population -- the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce says that's about right. With Stefani Germanotta on the team, I'm hopeful that homeless teenagers will start getting more recognition as being, in the overwhelming number of cases, survivors of domestic violence.

In Manhattan and Astoria, Queens: The Ali Forney Center

In Manhattan: Sylvia's Place

In Astoria, Queens: Generation Cue

Help A Sister Out

Hey, dear readers, welcome to a brand-new weekly feature of this blog, hastily entitled "Help A Sister Out." In this fabulous new column, I will post problems that people e-mail me with, or leave in the comments, and I'll post the response  I sent them in reply. You, too, are welcome to leave your (empathetic, helpful, productive) advice in the comments, or to submit a question, anonymously or by name.

This week's question comes from M., who writes:

I have a question, how do us teenage girls who are attempting to understand life, escape from it all safely? My dad and mom both drink, and my stepmom takes it out on my siblings, but what am I supposed to do? I don't want to drink or do drugs or run away, but what do I do? How do we go about this?

My initial, hasty reply:

The answer is to talk to a teacher or guidance counselor at school, or some other adult you trust in a position of authority, and ask them to help you leave home safely and legally. I'm glad you don't want to do drugs, drink, or run away. I hope so much that things will get better for you.

But now that I consider the question again, I don't think that M. is asking for advice about how to leave home. She's asking for advice on how to stay at home, and not go crazy. She recognizes that she is dependent on her parents for the next few years, and that her other options are limited, so how does she make the best of it in the meantime? 

She used the word escape, which can be a really good and hopeful word, one that sometimes gets a bad rap. As M. probably knows, reading provides an amazing escape from your immediate circumstances in the very short-term. Writing, too, can provide a great escape, as well as a necessary catharsis. Talking about your problems with the person you trust most -- yourself, to yourself in your journal -- is a great way to gain new insight every day. And talking to people you trust, whether you talk about your specific circumstances, or you just talk about life in general, is the healthiest thing you can do for yourself.

Because there is escapism, which feels bad, because it involves escaping from things you need to feel good in order to feed an addiction. And then there is true escape, a breakthrough, when you actually find a way to break free of a situation that hurts you. Escaping into your passions, your imagination, your curiosity, nature, exercise, play, art, the love and friendship of your family of choice -- these escapes feel good. They make you happier, and stronger, and more prepared to face the unpredictable and often unwanted events of our lives.  You escape by training for the life you want to have, by keeping your eyes on the prize, and telling yourself, "Things are going to get better." Which they will. The older you get, the more control you have over your life, and let me tell you -- it's pretty fucking awesome to be an adult. Not gloating, just promising.

So that's my new advice to M. What's yours?

So, quickly, so much

I am typing this with my own actual hands right now, which is so fucking stupid, because they still hurt like hell, but the voice recognition software sucks, and I can't stand not writing. Talking's not the same; then I have to hear the words as they're coming out, and I have time to judge them before they even hit the page. With writing they have at least a shot of making it out there before I take them back.

So, quickly, so much:

1. Oil spill! I posted on Facebook three days after the event, "I am sick to my stomach over this oil spill." TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER! So sick! I swore to myself that I was going to keep the horror and outrage foremost in my mind, and to never forget my complicity in the destruction being wrought, and to be in a constant state of mourning until the thing was capped. And yet, here I am, burning oil to tell you all about my feeeeeeelings! 

So here's what I have done/am doing/will do:

Stop eating fish. Ovo-lacto pescetarianism is no longer good enough, and I've known this for a while. 
Completely cut out bottled water. I've gotten in the habit of carrying my own tap water with me, but sometimes I'm caught without, and will buy bottled. No more. NB: I've noticed that take-out places are getting a lot better about giving you tap water if you ask for it with your meal.
Looked at the mutual funds in my IRA, saw what they were comprised of, and divested in everything related to oil.
Uh, pledged to stop wasting shit and consuming as much as I do. So instead of sitting here burning fuel while I think of more stuff, I'll jump ahead to: 

2. My hands still hurt. I'm seeing doctors and getting advice, so I hope this will end soon. One thing I've had to do is stop sleeping with my face on my hands, which I've done all my life. Even waking, I am almost always resting my face in at least one hand, if not both. It's a relic of my thumbsucking years, the way even now I pause while writing and press one knuckle against my upper lip. I quit that fifteen years ago, now I have to quit face fondling. As long as I don't have to quit writing. That's my biggest fear, that I'll never type or write longhand without pain again, which seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? I'm half convinced this is psychosomatic anyway, that it came from writing a really painful book about my mother for which I feel profoundly guilty. Maybe my hands are trying to save me some other kind of pain. I don't know. It's hard to sleep on my back, not curled up with my hands against my cheek, the soothing press of my own flesh saying I'm here, I'm still here. It's hard, not being able to write or to type, I'm here, I'm still here.

3. New website coming soon! Girlbomb is becoming a group blog, featuring the voices of people like you, if you're reading this -- you can email us at janice dot erlbaum at gmail for more information. And by "us" I mean me and the junior editor who'll be helping me run things around here, America's Next Top Girlbomb, Melissa Saunders. Welcome, Meeblez!

That's not nearly it, but I was an idiot for typing this long, and I'm going to pay for it. But it felt so gooooood...