"Me too," I agreed.
"No kids pounding on the door. No one screaming for food, brawling, or whining about someone stealing something..."
"They won't be this young forever. Then I can fuck you any way I want, anywhere I want, and as loudly as I want," I told her, smiling as my mind wandered to the night that Hunter had asked what I was doing to mommy to make her cry after we came out of the bedroom. We'd learned to be a little quieter from then on. Or sometimes, I would come back home from work in the middle of the day when the boys were off in school, walk up behind her while she scrubbed the floor, fucking her on her hands and knees, or jumping her up onto the dryer as it spun, finding that added a fun new element, and even once, throwing her into the open trunk of her new SUV, surrounded by bags of groceries, and eating her out right there in the driveway - not giving a single fuck about someone possibly seeing.
We'd needed to get inventive over the years, suffered periods of droughts when life got too chaotic, but we always found our way back to each other, to the bliss we found in each other's bodies.
"We should call home," she told me after I had leaned in and kissed her until our mouths felt swollen and oversensitive.
"We have four babysitters," I remind her.
"Charlie..." she said, dragging out the end sound, giving me a brow raise.
"You're right. The house might be on fire," I agreed, moving away from her to find the phone that had just been installed that morning.
It turned out there was no house fire.
Just a minor concussion and a bloody nose.
And four babysitters who would never come to our house again, no matter how much we offered to pay them.Helen - 18 yearsWhen my boys would someday talk about me and my mothering, I had a feeling they would focus on the times when I went a bit apeshit, when I had lost my cool, when I had gotten a little inventive with my punishments.
They would not, however, explain how I had told them ten times to stop doing something before I whacked them with a spoon I was mixing pasta with. Or how they missed curfew four times in a single week before I locked them out on the front porch. Yes, in the dead of winter. Yes, risking frostbite. But out of ideas on how else to drive the point home that there were rules that had to be obeyed out of respect for the people who made them.
Did I occasionally worry the neighbors might call child protective services on me when the windows opened up in the spring, and they could hear me screaming like a banshee about putting the seat down, getting the dishes into the sink not just piled on the counter, or quit pounding on each other? Yes, yes I did.
But any social worker who spent ten minutes with my teenaged boys would completely understand why they needed to spend a night out in subzero temperatures or get a whack here and there.
Charlie and I had always considered ourselves firm, but fair. Respect for their parents and other adults was the number one rule. After that, Sunday dinners. After that, not getting expelled from school, though we conceded that a few detentions and suspensions were unavoidable. Then, as they got to those ages, respect for the girls they dated. Somewhere way way down at the bottom was not killing each other.
So they got away with a lot based on the hierarchy of rules, but the big ones that they broke, yeah, those got swift and ruthless punishment.
I wasn't the raving lunatic some of their stories might paint me to be. I was just a woman who could only take so much from her children, a woman who understood that if they didn't fear and respect me, they never could respect and care for other women. A person who was outnumbered, overworked, and in constant need of a wine refill.
I had once thought that once they got past the needy, fit-throwing toddler stage, things would be smooth sailing.
I had not, clearly, been prepared for teen boys whose fists started to cause a lot more damage than they used to, who threw themselves into every dangerous or potentially illegal situation after the next, who itched at the confines of adolescence, yearning for the freedom of adulthood.
"That sure sounds a lot like bitching to me," I said, back to Mark as I stirred pasta sauce for the lasagne I was making for dinner.
"I told Colton I would go with him."
"And you should have consulted your work schedule before you agreed to go anywhere with Colt," I reminded him, shrugging a shoulder.