The Newest in Exercise Equipment

“Hey, baby, where’s that yoga-ball chair thingie of yours?” the Man I Married asked. “Ya still got it?”

Since the chair was in the closet beneath a pile of baskets and purses, I could hardly claim that I was using it so MIM couldn’t. I had frequent, good intentions of unearthing it. My excuse, and I’m sticking with it, is that it’s too low for my desk. Neither could I claim that he wouldn’t care for it properly, since I wasn’t doing that, either. So I let him dig it out and haul it happily off to the Barage. He promised to return it in mint condition.

Evidence mounted that he was not using the yoga-ball chair to strengthen his abs. Flour was the first clue—odd bits of flour paste smeared around the kitchen, not quite cleaned-up evidence. But clue about what, exactly? Believe me, I’ve learned not to ask, especially when it was apparent that he was going to great lengths to keep his project under wraps.

I ask you, if your husband had asked you innocuously enough about borrowing your yoga ball, would you have been prepared for this:

New in Exercise Equipment: The Neck-Strengthener Hat

The Peared Piper

Quite a Pear, and Quite a Pair

Sometimes I’m asked how I manage to survive without television. But with entertainment like this around my home, who needs it?

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Romance Novels and the Seven-Day Erection

At a bar a while back, I got into a spirited intellectual disagreement with a male friend. As is often the way with debates at bars, we were discussing booze and sex. Sean recalled that in Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known narrative poem, beer civilized the savage wild man; I insisted that it was sex that tamed the naked wild man.

Did I mention that the bar is in my garage? It is a real bar, eight feet long, L-shaped, and made of dark wood, stained and chipped and water-marked by long usage. The bar used to anchor Milady’s, a real saloon across Salmon Bay from our house, where the Man I Married had his very first gig and I came up with the idea for a dirty story later published in Best Women’s Erotica and Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Believe me, there’s lots of time for a gal’s imagination to run wild while she waits for her man to unload gear, set up, tune, and later re-load after an all-too-brief set.

Some time after that gig, the Man I Married was seized with a sudden and inexplicable urge to visit the RE-Store to look at salvaged items. We had no remodeling projects in the works and MIM didn’t make a habit of visiting the RE-Store. He walked in, and there was the bar-top from Milady’s. He installed the very big bar in what was then our very small house, and then he moved it to the garage of our current house, along with brass foot railings and the nine-foot long neon sign from Harvey’s Tavern, where he’d been part of the house band for five years. Hence the garage is now the Barage.

Since the bar disagreement took place in my own home, I simply went to my den down the hall to find my copy of Gilgamesh, dog-eared at the page early in the tale in which Enkidu, the naked wild man, sees his first human female and has a seven-day erection, which never flags despite constant lovemaking with a prostitute/priestess. After a week of this, Enkidu stands up on two legs, “his knees trembling,” and returns to his animals. But they reject him. He is now fully human and no longer part of the animal world.

He knew that his mind had somehow grown larger,
He knew things now that an animal can’t know.

Enkidu moves to the city with the prostitute/priestess (where I recall he has some smoking hot sex with the king, his “best friend”). The poem mentions nothing about the priestess and her stamina, though I imagine she had a bit of a bow-legged walk for a while, this being about 3,000 years before the invention of Astroglide. Enkidu is described as being “huge,” and we can be fairly certain that describes more than his height and shoulders. But she seems to have taken the whole affair in stride.

When I read the passage aloud, Sean was stunned. How had he possibly remembered that it was beer—not sex—that had civilized the savage wild man? It’s pretty hard to confuse a week-long woody with a Hefeweizen.

No bet had been wagered, but I clearly won the argument, as well as effectively shutting down all of the men at the bar with the bit about the seven-day erection, the trembling knees being the only after-effect of note.

Not until quite awhile later, just last week, did I come across a different quote from Gilgamesh, in which Enkidu, upon entering the city:

Drank beer, the custom of the land.
Beer he drank—seven goblets.
His spirit was loosened.
He became hilarious.
His heart was glad and his face shone.

Here, then, was the passage that Sean had remembered (which I haven’t yet told him, because, let’s face it, proving yourself unequivocally right in a bar dispute is damn satisfying, in fact the only thing that could possibly beat it is if the argument had been with MIM). Both Sean and I had read the full text of Gilgamesh. How was it that I remembered only the seven-day erection, while Sean had remembered only the seven goblets of beer? Neither one of us remembered that Enkidu, on his path to becoming civilized, also ate his first bread, which surprises me, because there are days when I’d take a loaf of crusty sourdough hands down over a roll in the hay. In either case, seven days of sex or seven goblets of beer makes for a much better story than the Old Testament yawner about God creating the earth in seven days.

Yet it also seems to me that what one man and one woman remembered years after reading the same text illustrates some fundamental differences between men and women.

You’d think it would be men with sex on the brain—not so much the dude’s seven-day stiffy but the fact that he had a beautiful, free prostitute who was game for a solid week of nonstop schtupping. But my recent highly scientific research into romance novels backs up the breakdown of women and men by preoccupation with sex and beer.

Statistics:

Beer is the third most popular drink in the world (following water and tea).

Men drink the majority (80%) of the volume of beer consumed nationally.

Of the 1500 U.S. microbreweries counted in 2005, all but a small handful are owned by men, and men brew the beer.

Women buy the majority (64%) of books purchased.

92% of these women buy romance novels.

Approximately 97.8% of these romance novels, based on the eight I’ve read this year, are about lust and always—except for one—culminate in on-the-page, play-by-play sex. No space breaks or white space or “… Afterwards …”

My Excel spreadsheet shows the following breakdown of sex in these eight novels:

Oral at 35%, W9Y* at 67%

In five of the eight, the man gives the woman oral sex before any other hanky panky other than kissing occurs. (Oral sex occurs at 35% into my current read, which is much earlier than in the other scientific samplings. More common is the book like the one in which the heroine receives oral sex at the 92% mark and the couple proceeds to penetration at 95%. Percentages courtesy of my Kindle ebook reader. Tax writeoff!)

Oral & W9Y 75% thru 100%

In only one does the woman give the man oral sex first: this happens at the 75% point, but the next 25% of the novel is a protracted sex scene in which they screw repeatedly throughout all of the rooms in two neighboring apartments (kitchen, livingroom, bedroom, bathroom), and the heroine repeatedly does this thing where she hooks both legs over the dude’s shoulder (singular, not plural), which was a bit of a mood killer as I was kinda thrown every time I tried to picture it; the author did include a prior scene in which the heroine attended a yoga class, so the heroine didn’t “break character” with her adept Ankles On Shoulder Pose. Then, however, we switch to the point-of-view of the cat, and breaking a fundamental literary rule about sudden POV shifts is too kinky even for me.

With 0% oral and W9Y, bah humbug is right.

In only one of the eight books for my highly scientific sampling, there’s no sex at all, but this was in the sub-category of Super Sneaky Mormon Romance, which never outs itself as being a Super Sneaky Mormon Romance. I finally figured it out when the entire huge family all toasts each other with apple juice at the holiday dinner. So busted as a Super Sneaky Mormon Romance! Clue: if it takes place in Salt Lake City, chances are it’s a Super Sneaky Mormon Romance. This one ends, of course, in a marriage proposal.

In the last of the eight, I can’t remember where the sex starts and if oral sex (for her) comes first. I think I was doing something silly like distracting myself by reading for plot.

Oral at 92%, W9Y at 95%

Three of the eight feature a cat, one features a dog, and more than one features the man persistently trying to feed the woman. He feeds her donuts (Krispy Kreme) or teaches her to make Chicken Marsala. Right. Soooo unbelievable as far as fantasies go. Men by the library-cart load all dying to give women oral sex I can buy if I’m on my second dirty martini, even with time travel (and historical sex in which nobody smells to high heaven) thrown in, but him showing her how to tenderize a chicken and telling her she’s not using enough butter and olive oil? Pah. My Willing Suspension of Disbelief just went out the window with the tomcat.

Three feature an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, with two of these conceptions happening on the first night of illicit sex, and two happening in historical fiction. In the modern one, the heroine is dumb enough not to have read her directions for The Pill and neither had her doctor explained it to her, I guess because she got her prescription in Texas. But mostly these books feature the crinkling of a condom packet and the always deft maneuvering of the modern-day, self-actualized hero in rolling that sucker on one-handed, always off-the-page. It’s not Thanksgiving, and we ladies reading romance don’t need to know about the sausage stuffing.

In these books, the hero always knows his Wine or his Whiskey—always the good stuff, and he willingly shares these and his knowledge of same with his Conquest.

But he never, ever offers her a beer. That, my friends, would be memoir, not romance.

——————–

*Whole Nine Yards

Some of my favorites so far, along with anything by Elinor Lipman:

Oral sex for her first

Major use of the white space but still loved this absolutely charming novel.

W9Y at 99%

I edited it so I’m biased, but I say it’s a good read. (Oral sex for her? Check.)

Distracted by plot

Hard not to like a saucy Irish 1st person POV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Further Lamentations from the Cider-Maker’s Wife

In 1993—just shy of age thirty—I began seriously writing. I had always thought I’d be a writer. I wrote my first novel (on an electric typewriter) in the seventh grade but had written nothing since graduating in 1986 from college (where I took difficult classes such as the one where we spent an entire summer studying music videos–honestly, I get tired of hearing law and nursing students complain about their workload when I think about my arduous classes).

My plan was to write screenplays in Hollywood, but I ended up back home with my parents and working at an ad agency (typing spreadsheets, still using a typewriter, and an occasional newsletter). I worked my way up to becoming the Promotion Director for a prominent National Public Radio station (it’s easy to be the Director when you’re the only one in the department), but then I nosedived down to being a secretary when I thought I’d try graduate school. I never made it to grad school because I began to write again.

At the turn of the millennium, I began to publish that writing.

In other words, outside of pesky day jobs that earned a paycheck, I’ve been working at one craft, one dream, one goal, for two decades, if not my entire life. I did some obsessive gardening for awhile, but even that I thought of as research for a future novel about a gardener.

I recently read this quote from Brenda Ueland (1938, If You Want to Write):

“Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.”

I thought, Wow, I’m lucky. Not only have my parents encouraged my dream (who do you think paid for that rock video class?), but The Man I Married has also positively supported me as a writer for a couple of decades. I’ve worked a paying job (not related to writing) for most of that time, so I’m not talking financial support. I mean that he has always assumed that I can do it, I will do it, and that I have the talent, determination, and perseverance to succeed. Whenever I’m part of a group reading, he always tells me I was the best, and he means it.

Although my need for time alone and for quiet doesn’t always mesh well with his lifestyle, he’s always backed me. He’s been my loudest cheerer and my biggest believer, especially when I started, which is when I needed it the most.

Likewise, I have supported him. With all of his goals except for one.

In that same amount of time, our 25 years together, the Man I Married has focused on, in chronological order, the following hobbies, crafts, dreams, and passions:

To become a high school art teacher (he hooked me with that one the night we met)
To become a counselor for brain-injured people
To ride his motorcycle cross-country
To restore an old motorcycle (which became a half dozen motorcycles)
To ride his motorcycle (which one?) from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego
To ride his motorcycle around the world
To start a head injury rehabilitation business in New Orleans (where we first had to move)
To scuba dive, so that he could:
Underwater metal detect for lost treasure
To build a treehouse, which quickly became:
To run a Treehouse Campground
To restore an antique wooden sailboat
To sail around the world
To learn how to play the guitar. Then the standup bass. Then the banjo. Then the fiddle. (I’ve missed a few.)
To play in a band.
To make beer.
To be a father.
To make hard cider.
To write a book about being a father and a cider maker.
To start a hard-cider business.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, like his brief obsessions with parrots (that was a bad day for me and the parrot) and bonsai (the upside is that you can’t really tell when a bonsai plant is dead).

He’s always gotten the neon green light from me, even when I thought his dreams were unrealistic and doomed, like that old boat, but it gave him a place to smoke cigars; the leaky boat was like a humidor and so smelly you didn’t notice the cigar. Even when he effortlessly churned out thousands of words on his book, which I’m sure would be a bestseller if he ever finished it.

I’ve never stood in his way. Even if he were to drown in the Bering Sea or meet his maker in the Andes, he’s been free to chase his dreams.

Obviously I’m attracted to dreamers—although when I married him he was still on Dream Number One, so I couldn’t have predicted this trait—and I get something out of the drama they create. Otherwise my life in front of the typewriter would be pretty dull. As he likes to say, he gives me something to write about. He’s why I don’t need a television for entertainment.

So, why then, am I finding the last item on the list so difficult?

First of all, there’s the list itself. To put it bluntly, I’m fucking exhausted. I’ve invested something of myself in believing in each item on his list. I’m feeling kinda done, except for getting this child safely through childhood and pondering yoga and an annual vacation and thinking about scheduling my first colonoscopy in a couple of years.

Second, we’re now parents. Which was a big item on his list. Wasn’t that supposed to satiate something? In a big way? And, with parenting this particular child, let’s just say that we have a lot on our plates.

Third, he’s thinking about entering the food industry. Which, let’s be honest, involves 1) long hours of hard work (not his strong point) and, 2) a high percentage of failure (unlike statistics for novelists).

But, after much soul-searching, I’ve realized the most important difference between this dream and all of the others preceding it:

The treehouses, the motorcycles, the boats, were all offsite, which, let’s face it, contributed to the longevity of our union, since he was largely occupied elsewhere and we then had something to talk about when he arrived back home.

Dinner out tonight, honey?

But the hard-cider business involves my kitchen.

And laundry room. And bathtub. All of the traipsing around with sticky things between kitchen, bathroom, and laundry room involves my floors.

We’ve never had the same standard of cleanliness, which has led to the lion’s share of our disagreements over twenty-five years, but it’s been navigable: I’ve lowered my standards and he’s raised his. But when a man is making 200 gallons annually of hard cider, it affects my territory. Terribly. Awfully. Tragically. Irreversibly. The bathtub is now permanently scarred from keg skid marks. It’s like the Phantom of the Opera but with porcelain and grout instead of acid and face masks, and the off-key shrieking is mine, all mine.

Cleanliness is Next to Drunkenness

Yes, MY kitchen, because I am currently the chief cook (but not chief bottle washer) in this domestic arrangement.

Which pisses me off a little bit: How is it that a man who can’t even take the hairs out of his hairbrush (any of them, for years) or wipe up his crumbs—ever—can regularly sterilize 200 bottles? Who hasn’t bought toilet paper in a decade can travel a hundred miles to buy special tanks? Who doesn’t notice that he’s standing in six inches of water from a plugged shower drain can monitor minute changes in fermentation? Who can’t contribute to a shopping list when he’s used the last of something but can keep copious, meticulous notes about his brewing process?

That Sponge is for Labeling, Not Cleaning

Not that I don’t know that he has housework in him. Our arrangement of domestic chores changes depending on who is working outside the home more. When he was a college student with summers off and I was a full-time cubicle worker, he did more of the housework, which he took a great deal of pride in. One day he was so driven to have pretty, shiny floors that, in a burst of inspiration, he mopped them with Armor All. The drawback to this plan didn’t become obvious until his wife stepped in through the front door at the end of a hard work day and slid across the floor until she landed on her ass across the room. When the man is motivated, he brings his creativity to mundane routines.

In his defense, it’s not like he’s sitting on his duff while I parade around in an apron. He contributes significantly to Care and Management of the Little Monster. And he takes care of big ticket items that are out of my scope, like replacing the water heater or installing new faucets. I call these the Standalone Sexy Tasks; we will notice and admire his handiwork for years, while my mopped floor is past tense in three minutes—or less if he’s brewing.

Apparently my wily method of keeping him from reading my blog posts isn’t working, because he read my post asserting that he would never manage to clean the three 55-gallon drums through their two-inch holes. He took this as a thrown gauntlet and not only cleaned them but bought two more.

So now I have a dilemma with his hard-cider business. If I scoff and say he’ll never do it, perhaps that will drive him to stick with it, to the detriment of my kitchen.

But if I encourage him as I’ve done with all of his other harebrained ideas, perhaps he’ll give it up. This is a mighty tempting and devious plan.

But perhaps my best bet for marital harmony is to say, “You’ll never manage to install a sink in the laundry room.” To prove me wrong, he would install the sink, which would keep his nefarious cider business out of the kitchen and bathroom, at least.

Because it would be sad if he gave it up. Gosh darn it, his cider is not only tasty, but he’s created a co-op (of really nice people who might need a good twist to get their heads on straight) and fostered community (of alcoholic nut jobs). Also, hauling around all of the equipment contributes to his hot bod (not bad for a man in spitting distance of fifty).

BUT, in regards to the cideries we’ve traveled to (interpretation: our last seven vacation trips)? The wives at these places are a happy and integral part of the business that was clearly their husbands’ bright idea.

No. No. And no. If I bake one apple pie a year, it’s a banner accomplishment. I refuse to help run a cidery. Let me rephrase that. I refuse to help run my husband’s cidery.

Although I did help him clean those 200 bottles once when he was under the gun. If only to get them out of my kitchen.

But just the other day, he went too darn far with his dastardly plan to get me to buy in to his cidery:

He came up with his first-ever terrific plot idea for me. Involving, you guessed it, a cider maker.

Let the research begin.

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Sinking Your Teeth into a Groundbreaking New History of Hockey, Part II

Part II. The Birth of Hockey: A Groundbreaking World History

[continued from Part I: My Personal Hockey History]

It’s time to set the record straight about hockey players and teeth. I seriously can’t believe what they fail to teach kids in school these days.

If you know anything about Greek mythology, you know that around 2000 BCE, Cadmus—credited for the original alphabet—erected (not a casual choice of the word) the city of Thebes. You know, where Oepidus later had a little hanky panky with his mama (the earliest known Cougar), and Dionysus got some ladies so pickled and riled up that they mistook Pentheus (Pen as the Greek root for Peeping, and Tom being the modern derivative of Theus) for a cow and tore him to shreds. (Why the drunk women would tear a leering bovine to shreds is off topic, but I’m sure most women have felt a similar urge.) The earliest cult images of Dionysus show him in procession with his followers, bearded satyrs with erect penises, and he and the satyrs each carry a Thrysus.

Early Hockey

What you might not know is that the Thyrsus was long thought to be a giant fennel staff of symbolic significance (symbolizing, what else?, an erect penis), but when Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy in 1873, the Thrysus was definitively proven (after centuries of unsubstantiated speculation) to be the Original Hockey Stick. As if bearded satyrs with erect penises would be carrying anything else. Thrysus and Thrust have of course now become interchangeable in romance novels.

Cadmus, you see, slew a dragon in his spare time (thankfully after he got to zeta, or we would now be up a creek without a z; our postal system would slow down even further, if that’s possible, without zip codes, and we could no longer ski without the ability to zigzag).

Cadmus then sowed the dragon’s teeth in the ground, whence sprang a race of fierce hockey players (field hockey, of course, this being ancient Greece, where the men needed to be naked in order to display their erect penises, which would be too cold and shriveled were ice to be involved, and no one wants their cult image to feature a wee little winkie).

Which One is the Goalie?

Cadmus tossed the first hockey puck (made of charred bone, since rubber was not yet invented and the ancient Greeks loved to burn this and that, like Troy and Atlanta) into their midst, and in what is now considered by historians to be the first hockey game, this crowd of newly-hatched warriors immediately beat each other to death until only five remained. Thus, a hockey team has ever after been formed of five men on the ice at a time (if you don’t count the goalie, which no one does, because the goalie is actually a flopping halibut under all that padding and gear, which is why he is constantly having to squirt water on himself).

And thus, for the next four millennia, hockey players have continued to have a thing about teeth.

Think about it. Hockey players love to knock each other’s teeth out. But where do the teeth go??

Expansion teams, that’s where. For 4,000 years now, hockey players have been planting their knocked-out teeth in order to grow more hockey players. Where did you think they came from? Canada?

Yet there were only six teams in the National Hockey League until 1967, and now there are thirty teams.

Now, if it took approximately 3,967 years to go from one team to six teams, then what explains the exponential increase in hockey players from 1967 to the present day?

Fluoride.

With the 1960s came the the widespread use of U.S. water fluoridation. Fluoride in our water led to the sprouted warriors keeping more of their teeth from rotting out. The healthy teeth could then be knocked out and planted in order to generate the next burgeoning crop of hockey players. This also explains why hockey hasn’t flourished in China, where each player can plant only one tooth. (The black market for hockey teeth in China is a blight upon the sport but is beyond the scope of this article.)

Fertilizer has also contributed to expansion teams in unlikely places such as Ohio. More of the planted teeth sprout now with applications of Roundup, which promotes rapid growth of hockey players yet prohibits germination of runts who must later join equestrian teams littered with inbred members of the Royal Family. New homes needed to be found for the increase in healthy hockey players, and since nothing else is going on in Ohio, this seemed like a good place to send the latest harvest.

The sad fact about all of this germination and expansion is that Seattle—the first U.S. team to win the Stanley Cup, back in 1917—still lacks a hockey team. Even our junior league team moved down to Kent. Apparently this happened a couple of years ago when I wasn’t looking, which I discovered when I tried to buy tickets for me and my kid. No such luck.

What’s not to love?

So I am personally bringing the N.H.L. to Seattle. Maybe I’ll bring the Stanley Cup back to Seattle, too. And I’m for sure wiping the recent disgusting lockout off the map. That’s the power of fiction. If I don’t like reality, I can make something up.

So I dug up an old story I wrote during my hockey heyday. I’ve always been fond of the story and its central characters, but it was too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel. I’ve been revising it for a few months now and having a lot of fun with it.

It’s a comedy romance. Perhaps it will include the New Groundbreaking History of Hockey, with an additional section on how Grecian Dirt Hockey migrated to the North American Continent and became ice hockey, also necessitating a shift from wine to beer.

I promise to use thrust at least once.

 

 

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Sinking Your Teeth into a Groundbreaking New History of Hockey, Part I

Part I. My Personal Hockey History

Skip to Part II, The Birth of Hockey: A Groundbreaking New World History

Eight years into my quarter-century marriage, my husband left me.

The Man I Married got on the motorcycle we’d driven cross-country together the summer before and drove himself to New Orleans. Which is almost as far as you can get from Seattle yet remain on this continent. To get much farther, he’d have to sell the bike and buy a boat. Believe me, he’s considered it.

On that cross-country motorcycle trip the prior summer, I had insisted that we stop in New Orleans; he insisted that we not. He had no desire to go to New Orleans and it went against our only requirements for the 10,000-mile trip: no cities, no major roads, no planning. But I had a literary passion for the Crescent City and craved the opportunity to fondle the wrought-iron gates through which Lestat and Kate Chopin had passed. We quarreled about whether to stop in New Orleans all the way from Puget Sound to Lake Michigan; from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean; from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. MIM continued to resist the increasing pull as we rumbled back west from Georgia to Florida to Alabama to Mississippi, while the ringing of “Stella!” grew louder in my ears until I could hear nothing else, least of all his protests that I was deviating from everything he held sacred about this trip.

Writers have no right to look this good, especially when not regularly bathing

He was reading Sun Tzu and had taken to fits of roadside contemplation in which he posed artfully in leather pants atop boulders and beside brooks, with a pen and a tiny notebook and an increasing amount of facial hair.

I was reading…well, nothing, because there was no room in my saddlebag for a book. Women sometimes have to pack things that take up a significant amount of room but which we cannot go without. I had sacrificed Colleen McCullough for New Freedom. That would be New Freedom from what, exactly? Oh, yeah, from pesky distractions like books.

We went to New Orleans (did you doubt that I would win the argument?), with MIM grumbling the whole way. The hostel was full, and we kept having to ask for directions through bullet-proof glass. MIM grew more and more irate. He anticipated a disaster upon which he would have the divine satisfaction of blaming me.

Our boots in the Atlantic.

But then we were directed to a charming hostel-wannabe, where a little black dog made ardent love to MIM’s biker boot. The ancient fluff ball had never had a sexual bone in his body until he smelled the boot that matched him in size and color. And from then on, from sunrise to sunset, that dog humped MIM’s boot: under the breakfast table, out on the brick driveway, up on the old wooden galleries that wrapped around the house. We would listen to the wind rustle through the oak trees, the distant sound of the St. Charles Streetcar, and the creaking of MIM’s boot as the dog mated with it.

MIM fell hard. For the old house, for its dotty proprietress, for the dog Django, for the city itself. Rumor had it that one of the lesser Marsalis brothers lived next door. By the following afternoon, we were riding around clutching real estate listings and maps, looking at sprawling mansions with price tags of $20,000.

Me: “There must be something wrong with a mansion that takes up a city block yet costs less than most cars.”

MIM: “Potential! Potential! Potential!” (He kicked away the used syringes, hoping I hadn’t noticed.)

Could’ve been mine

Four days later, I still had not managed to crowbar MIM out of New Orleans. He wanted to stay. Like, forever. Never complete the bike trip, which would remain a lopsided horseshoe rather than a complete circle on the map of the country. Never go back to Seattle. Never get our stuff or go back to our jobs. Desert our cats. Just, like, go with the flow, man.

We left New Orleans (did you doubt that I would win the argument?), with the caveat that he would try a more adult version of moving to a new city. Which meant getting an internship.

So the following spring, he left me. He drove away to go do some social work thing there. You know, get college credit for tagging along with people who were actually working. Never mind that he wasn’t in college anymore and didn’t need credit. He would be living with the dotty proprietress and her boot-enamored pooch. At least MIM’d be getting some while he was gone. That made one of us.

He quickly met a kindred spirit in a coworker, got drunk, and stayed drunk.

I missed him terribly. I yearned and pined for him. This was all terribly unlike me.

I did the only logical thing:

I turned on the television.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but:

HOCKEY.

I fell hard. I fell fast. I fell irrevocably, like MIM had for the Great Muddy.

Hockey’s Coveted Trophy for Most Memorable Hair

This was back in the day when the Fox broadcast television network was trying to bring hockey to the American masses on weekend afternoons. This was an uphill battle, because our great country is accustomed to large objects, like silicone breasts, filling our screens, and we resisted the effort it took to watch a small, difficult-to-track, black rubber disk traveling at a hundred miles per hour while a bunch of toothless guys in a ridiculous amount of padding whacked at it occasionally but mostly whacked at each other. So Fox dumbed hockey down for us (difficult, I know) and fitted the pucks with computer chips, which left comet trails of green or blue or red on the TV screen—the color depended on the speed of the puck—when shots were rocketed cross-ice. In this way, it was hoped that we could at least see what the fuss was about down there on a sheet of glaring ice in absurd places like Florida and Arizona, where hockey in June should frankly be illegal.

I didn’t care one way or the other about the digital comets, because for some weird reason, I got hockey. This Pineapple Head became addicted to a winter sport. My husband was gone. I needed a fix. Hockey beat crack.

Who could possibly miss their husband during a Stanley Cup Game Four that went into three overtime periods, remaining at 0-0 for the equivalent of an entire extra game before one goal clinched the championship? The players were hooked up to intravenous drips during intermissions to replace the fluid they were sweating out. Seriously: baseball? Wimps!

Husband? What husband?

We didn’t have cable, so I would drive to a sports bar up on Highway 99 to watch the games. Yes, that Highway 99. That stretch. Hookers, shootings, drug deals, yeah, whatever. I had a game to watch. Sometimes a dude would join me at my table, but he’d leave me be after I told him to shush a few times. MIM knows just what they felt like.

My husband eventually returned home after his “internship” ended. But he wanted to move back to New Orleans permanently–with me, which is nice–and do some social work thingie down there. He had job leads. I had one condition: if I agreed to move, we would get cable so I could watch hockey.

Pretty blouses!

Imagine living in New Orleans for the ten days of Mardi Gras! But, alas, I had a conflict of interest: the Winter Olympics, where my favorite player was on the Czech team that eventually won the Gold. The Czech uniforms were real pretty, a lovely shade of red with a beautiful crest embroidered on the front. Plus Women’s Hockey debuted that year at the Olympics. Mardi Gras in New Orleans? Pshaw. I had cable. I had hockey games to watch.

This worked out beautifully, since our house filled up with out-of-town friends and friends of friends who came from all over the country to experience Mardi Gras with “locals.” I would load them all into our pickup truck (without seatbelts in the open truck bed, drunk and sitting on each other’s laps, but the important thing is that I was sober). I’d drop them off in the French Quarter, where no parking was to be had in the madness, and drive back home to watch hockey by myself. MIM and Friends were happy for the taxi service, and I was happy to get them all out of the house so as not to make noise while the games were on.

But the social work thingie didn’t work out. Someone threatened to shoot my dog. Oh, and to shoot MIM, too. We moved back to Seattle. MIM bought a boat and started making plans to sail around the world. I got cable.

But it wasn’t long before I stopped watching hockey. I’m not sure why. I suppose because I stopped being lonely—I was no longer home without a husband, or in a new home where I had a husband but knew no one else. Also, Seattle is a super stinky hockey town. Between the Mariners and the Sonics—who left town after making sure their bazillion dollar arena makeover ensured no hockey could be played there, because they didn’t want to have to share, neener neener—nobody talks hockey here. We don’t even have a minor league team.

My favorite hockey player become U2′s guitarist

Also, hockey lost some of its je ne sais quoi when certain mullets were scissored into history.

But when my baseball-fanatic son turned ten, I decided it was time that he be indoctrinated. Time for him to learn that hockey players are vastly superior to baseball players, who sit around and snack on sunflower seeds during games. Disgraceful. Hockey players eat each other’s teeth (and maybe an earlobe or two) if there’s any time for snacking.

So I gave the Little Monster a G-rated hockey history lesson. Following is the Director’s Cut, unedited history lesson:

Continue to Part II, The Birth of Hockey: A Groundbreaking New World History

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Nothing Happened This Year

We brought no foster children into our home. We adopted no kids. So we had no big party. I still have not put away the party dress from last year’s adoption celebration, held one year ago tonight. The gown is still hanging over the back of the bedroom door. Guess it’s not going to the cleaner’s anytime soon. I’m in no rush. On pretty much anything.

The child we already adopted was neither suspended nor expelled. Well, there might have been an in-school suspension or two, but I have suppressed the memory. He is busy growing. He works so hard at this that he is now almost as tall as I am.

We had no social worker visits. We loved our social workers, make no mistake. Warm, wonderful, amazing human beings who supported us above and beyond the call, but, still, there is some relief in having no social worker visits after two per month for over three years. Perhaps this explains why the house was not kept nearly as clean in 2012. Our standards slipped.

We took no five-state road trips. We took a two-hour road trip and cut it down from the planned three nights to two nights. We came back early in order to hook up with an out-of-state aunt and uncle so that they could help us break open a rock. Said aunt had given the Little Monster a big geode. Breaking open the rock was one of the highlights of the year. That’s how exciting we are. Somebody had to go fetch a couple of tools. That about took it out of us.

None of us quit our jobs. This was twice as easy as last year, because one of us had no job to quit.

We continued to enjoy the vasectomy results.

We put down a few square feet of grass seed. We watered it. The grass is growing. Come see our grass.

We didn’t manage Christmas cards. The cards I never sent last year are still on the coffee table. They are dusty.

The Little Monster and I did go to Hawaii. We sat around and ate. We went to the same beach every day. I am still recovering from the energy I had to expend walking to the car and back. Ask me what I’m doing and I’ll tell you I’m still digesting.

We contributed very little to the economy.

All of this to say: 2012 was a fantastic year in which nothing much happened. Aw, sure, there was the ceiling collapsing from a falling toilet, the shingles, the 40-to-60 foot flame (depending on who you ask) lit by The Man I Married.

But mostly we were too busy simply being a forever family to do much else.

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Nada Los Ho Ho Ho’s

Nothing funny happened this month.

Unless you count the morning that I couldn’t heat my tea, because there were three kegs between me and the microwave. If you’ve seen me staggering around in the mornings before I’ve moved on to my second cup of darker-than-coffee tea, you’ll know this wasn’t funny. But what could I do but laugh (in retrospect)?

Or unless you count the fact that it has come to light that the Little Man has been faking his way through choir for the past two months—going through more effort to pretend he knows the words than it would have taken him to learn the words—so he had to memorize the entire Christmas concert in one week. Brow-beating your child into learning the words to Joy to the World? Ironic, if not funny. “You have fifteen minutes to go downstairs and learn all of the verses. NOW! Without any more whining! And if you come back upstairs without having learned them, no dessert!” Ludicrous. You could never have predicted the things that emerge from your mouth since becoming a parent.

Or unless you count the Man I Married deciding that the Little Man was mispronouncing all of the words to the Spanish verse of Oh Christmas Tree, so he subsequently supervised the practice session(s) of O Arbol de Navidad. The Man I Married—an Ohio boy who still doesn’t get the English language right—enthusiastically slaughtered the Spanish language on our two trips to Mexico, much to the delight of the Mexicans, because at least he was trying to speak their language instead of expecting them to speak ours, and he was so awfully sincere and cheerful about it. From behind the closed bedroom door I heard a high voice warbling, “El ar-ree-oh-bord-uh dee Nah-bee-dahd,” followed by a deep bass thundering, “It’s El Ahr” (pirate-y) “Bowl dee Na-Vee-Dad” (rhymes with Badly Dad). Then a high voice arguing. Then a deep bass thundering about how a ten-year-old should not be arguing with a fifty-year-old about how to pronounce Spanish. They were both wrong, but I decided against poking my head in to offer up the correct way to pronounce Navidad.

Or unless you count my having coughed my way through the entire month, but the Man I Married, mercifully, slept through all of it. After a five-hour long coughing fit one night I asked him, “Did I keep you awake last night?” “No, why?” he answered. The following morning, after a relatively good night, he greeted me with, “Good news! I actually heard you coughing last night!” Which translated as, “I noticed you were suffering; aren’t I a considerate spouse?” Since he brings me my tea in the morning, I must dutifully answer in the affirmative.

Or unless you count Thanksgiving dinner, when members of my family went into a graphic explanation of polynidal cysts (think twice before looking it up). The anecdote included a detailed description of how a nurse in the exam room passed out upon…er…the sudden olfactory unpleasantness of my cousin’s cyst. The story was followed by the offer to display the heinous scars left by the removal of what turned out to be my cousin’s four cysts lodged at the base of his spine in the “gluteal cleft” (“one the size of a pool ball and three the size of ping pong balls”), with a double check first by his wife on how much of his butt we might have to view in order to see the scars (too much, apparently, since we thankfully were not rewarded with the threatened display). This conversation was followed by my aunt hiking up her shirt and removing her back brace so that my sis-in-law (a nurse-in-training) could remove a stitch or piece of skin from my aunt’s surgical incision site that wasn’t healing right and was bothering her. My sis-in-law held out the piece of removed body part to show me. Such matter of fact statements as, “Pus does not bother me” were uttered. Pie, anyone? I for one was snorting sangria out of my nose during this very unfunny banter. There is never such a thing as a “lull in the conversation” with my family.

Or that on the drive home from Thanksgiving dinner, I said to the Little Man that the thing I was most thankful for was that he was in my life. To which he responded that the thing he was most thankful for was that Buster Posey won the MVP for the World Series and that he got to see him hit three home runs in one game. Which is as it should be for a ten-year-old, who shouldn’t have to feel thankful for things like a family. That’s for weepy moms who had a little too much sangria and who kept grabbing the dashboard and yelping to the Man I Married, “Slow down!” He replied, “I’m going 48 miles-per-hour on the freeway.”

Or that, although the dog leaves her tidy little turds in the exact same place on the carpet every night when she decides it’s far too wet and cold to do her business outside, the Man I Married never looks there first before walking across it. And he never notices that he’s done it until he’s made several circuits of the entire house, tracking it everywhere. Which turns a quick and easy cleanup job into a…not so easy cleanup job. But, hey, it gets us to clean the house.

So, really, nothing very funny happened this month. If things don’t pick up around here, we might have to break down and buy a television so that we can pipe in a laugh track now and then.

And now I leave you with this traditional German Christmas tune to herald in our politically correct holiday season:

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12.5 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Guest Blog Post by My Dad about My Mom, w/ Rebuttal

Following is an email from my father, proving that one can never fully know one’s spouse. Also that my Dad is hilarious. He and my mother have been married for 51 years.

> From: Dad
> To: Jennifer
> Subject: weird Mom (Tutu)
> cc: Mom

> After all these years, I have found out that your mother doesn’t eat Oreo cookies in the way that normal people do.
>
> First, it takes 2 Oreo cookies at a time, not one (one is insufficient). The particular variety of Oreo cookie (there are several varieties) is not important.
>
> Next, give each of the 2 Oreo cookies a good firm squeeze.
>
> Then, carefully peel the top (outer) layer off each of the 2 cookies. Put the 2 top pieces aside.
>
> Now carefully peel the filling layer off one of the cookies and place it on top of the other filling layer.
>
> Put one of the outer pieces on top and squeeze hard a second time.
>
> Now remove the top layer cookie (it can be eaten now).
>
> Peel off the double layer of filling and carefully put aside (it MUST be eaten LAST).
>
> Eat the remaining outer layer cookies one by one.
>
> NOW and ONLY NOW, the squished filling can be eaten with gusto.
>
> I couldn’t believe it when I saw this demonstrated last night.
>
> Love to all !!!

Mom swiftly sent her corrections. I don’t think it matters that I don’t really understand the oreo cookie eating process she herein describes:

> Subject: Re: weird Mom (Tutu)
> From: Mom
> To: Dad
> cc: Jennifer

> Okay, that’s not right.  I take one cookie off each of the two cookies, then put the two centers together, squeeze GENTLY, remove a third cookie, and then remove the merged centers.  I then eat the four cookies, one at a time, and then eat the two centers.

> Actually, I can simply separate only one cookie and eat the cookies and then the center.

 

> He saw me at the end of the process, with the filling and cookies separate, and just can’t get his head around my explanation of what I do.

 

> One thing it shows is that there is a communication gap when one tries to explain what one has done.

 

> And after 51 years of marriage, he still has things to learn about me.  I only get to hear the occasional story of his youth that he has neglected to tell me.

Today is my mother’s 71st birthday. I think a package of Oreos instead of a cake this year?

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle Edition at Amazon

12 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

Husbanding the Hooch

The Man I Married suggested that we open the expensive bottle of vintner’s reserve red that he had bought as part of my compensation package for the three 55-gallon drums that he also purchased that day. (We had both forgotten to drink the special wine on our anniversary.) He made the suggestion on a Thursday, with nothing going on, not necessarily a reason to not drink special wine, but I wasn’t in the mood. For one thing, it was the first warm day of the year—not when I want to drink a room-temp red.

So I said, “Nah.”

“Well, we need to drink it soon,” he said.

“Why? It won’t go bad.”

“Because you have all of this wine lying around. It bothers me.”

I had maybe a dozen bottles of wine, tucked away in the pantry, not taking up room that he would use for something else. Half of these were wines that guests brought that we would likely take to other people’s parties, like fruitcake. “Um, but you have hundreds of bottles of cider, and kegs and fermenters and–”

Never mind THOSE bottles

“Yes, but those are moving out. I don’t hoard it. I don’t save it until I’m in the mood.”

Very little that I do bothers MIM. He’s a pretty accepting, easygoing guy, or at least he keeps his mouth shut about the things that do bother him; or, more likely, he forgets about whatever’s bothering him before he has a chance to bring it up. But this “habit” that I have of buying wine or beer and then not drinking it for perhaps months (gasp!) annoys him, which annoys me. The wine and beer aren’t in his way and they’re not hurting anything or being wasted.

I think it’s because it’s such a foreign idea to him. He can’t conceive of liking something but not immediately consuming it, which I also do with chocolate, making it last a long time though I eat a little every day. What bothers me is the idea of getting a craving for something but not having it when the mood strikes. So I keep a few varieties of beer and wine stocked for that perfect moment of wanting a sparkling white or a robust red. MIM, on the other hand, is from the school of “don’t buy more toilet paper until you’ve used the last roll.” Which hasn’t happened for 25 years because he’s married to me.

MIM can’t control himself with ice cream, like me with chips. There’s never any leftover ice cream in our house, though I rarely eat it. And once a bag of chips is opened, consider it in my tummy, though MIM rarely eats them. Poor Little Monster. Between LM’s two parents, he’s rarely left with ice cream or chips the next day. But the candy and jellybeans, which LM can’t control himself around, are all his.

MIM wasn’t asking me to stop eating his chips, which would be impossible. He just wants me to drink the booze. I think he’s lusting after the emptied bottles.

So be it. There are worse things than starting to drink more in order to please your spouse.

But when I proudly pointed out to MIM that I’d made some progress through a few “hoarded” bottles, he shrugged and said, “Oh, that. I’m over it.”

I swear, it’s enough to drive a person to drink.

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The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Kindle ebook and paperback at Amazon

12 humorous stories about sex and the sexes. These sensual yet comic stories offer a fresh take on literary erotic fiction, as if Anaïs Nin and Erma Bombeck met at the library to spin tales of laughter and the libido. Collected from the pages of Best American Erotica, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Best of Literary Mama, Clean Sheets, Zyzzyva, and others.

The Hive Mind

A few months back, the Man I Married and I had an argument.

After 25 years together, this wasn’t unusual. Our disagreements at one time could last a few days. That was when we had the luxury of putting our own emotions and needs first, before the Little Monster joined our family. Our arguments were usually about things like MIM leaving the gas tank empty when we shared a car, or his inability to let me know when he’d used the last of something before I went to the store. Although these quarrels might seem petty, MIM likes to remind me of what he learned in a college class: that most marriages don’t break up because of big picture disagreements like money or religion; they snap over things like toothbrushes. When MIM grabs my toothbrush (or comb, or soap) because he can’t find his and mine is handy, I totally understand the disintegration of a marriage; I much prefer it when he grabs my ass. A marriage counselor once wisely told us that some problems can be solved with money. Hence, MIM now stocks about forty toothbrushes, and we bought a second car—voila!, our arguments decreased.

What was unusual is that we had this particular quarrel in hearing of the Little Monster, who was in the next room. For three and a half years, we had been careful not to squabble in front of him. We figured he’d been traumatized by too much already, and we decided early on that we didn’t want to be responsible for any triggers in his troublesome behaviors. YOU ARE ENTERING A CALM AND STABLE ENVIRONMENT should have been stenciled on our front door. We hissed any grievances at each other only once the Little Monster was in bed, and we slapped our happy faces back on by the time he woke up the next morning. Quite honestly, we rarely had the energy to fight or carry it on for long when we did. We were a real team now, united on all fronts when it came to the Little Monster’s needs, and nothing else seemed much worth arguing about, anymore. Toothbrushes paled in comparison to the challenge we’d been given as parents.

This argument was brief and not even really explosive—it was more like a messy blurp when the spaghetti sauce gets too hot and that first bubble rises, pops, and splatters. Voices were elevated and tones of voice were not exactly lovey dovey. In fact the argument was about tone of voice, and who started using an unacceptable tone of voice with the other first. I called his tone of voice condescending, which started it, and he called mine mocking, which he said started it, and I agreed (compromise!) that I was mocking his condescension (which started it, on that I wouldn’t budge). But we didn’t shout, didn’t name call or swear, didn’t smack each other with plastic spatulas and ladles despite having them handy because of dinner prep, and we put the tension behind us quickly. We cooled off and the warm-ish words were done and over with in a minute.

The Little Monster broke out in hives at after-school-care the next day, just before we picked him up. The rash was gone by the next morning. The pattern repeated itself for the rest of the week, with mysterious red blotches appearing and disappearing for no apparent reason, but often right before he expected us to pick him up.

The Man I Married was positive that the hives were caused by our fight.

I wasn’t so sure. The Little Monster had arrived at our door with a white, bumpy rash much of the time, but it had disappeared—along with his clumsiness and quite a few extra pounds—with a healthy diet, exercise, sunshine, and lack of 24/7 cable TV on which he watched things like childbirth. The new outbreak of hives could have been caused by rug cleaner or grass at the daycare center, since he prefers to spend most of his time in various gymnastic poses on the ground rather than conforming to the upright-on-two-legs Homo sapiens thing.

He’d recently started eating the school’s cooked meat for lunch because the nutty Man I Married told him to, thinking it would be a healthy choice. When I heard this, I was naturally relieved that I could totally blame the hives on MIM for introducing a fake protein product full of salt and food dye into the Little Monster’s diet.

But we needed a definite answer about these hives, since it wouldn’t do to find the Little Monster unable to breathe one day while we were too preoccupied pointing the finger over why he had them.

So I took LM to the doctor, who diagnosed the rash as a skin irritation caused by something like scented laundry detergent, dryer sheets, or perfumed bath soap. The doctor waved away the notion that the allergy could cause LM’s airway to swell shut. As soon as I took the Little Monster to the doctor, the hives went away, never to return, before I changed any of the soaps. Of course.

Despite the doc’s diagnosis, MIM remained absolutely convinced that the rash was our fault. It was his medical proof that arguing is unhealthy. After a quarter century with me, he’s still not a fan of open disagreement, which his family never had. He had always told me with a sense of superiority that if there was a problem in his family when he was growing up, they would convene a Family Meeting to figure it out.

I was in awe of this method for years, clear proof that he was from more evolved stock than I, which gave him a lofty leg up in every disagreement that we had. More than a decade in to our marriage, I realized (as did he) that the Family Meeting was a sham. There was no democracy or meeting of the minds or round robin brainstorming. At the meeting, his mother would tell them all what to do, which they would obediently do after the meeting. Thus, there was never any disagreement. Like forty toothbrushes, voila!, problems solved. Then they would triumphantly and quietly go to the mall to buy bland decorations, bland clothing, and bland food. Thence they would return to a quiet home with no music or books.

My family, on the other hand, is vocal, whether happy or mad. Whereas MIM’s family would silently and stealthily not discuss the real problem, my family would loudly and dramatically not discuss the real problem. There would be stomping, yelling, crying, swearing, and slamming of doors. After we’d had enough of not solving the problem and not ever acknowledging the real issue, we would drink, swear, and laugh, feeling smug while boisterously reassuring ourselves that the rest of the world is made up of idiots. We then don loud clothing, make room on the messy table to eat spicy kim chee with Cheez-its and Gallo wine, and Dad blares free jazz on the radio and shouts out obscure time signatures.

Now that I’m a mother, I could become a huge fan of MIM’s mother’s method: everyone else should shut up and do as I say. Hm, tempting. Problem is, this doesn’t work so well down the road. Now that MIM is grown, the jig is up, and now MIM’s family is all about tense undercurrent and smug backstabbing of the offending party (always a female in-law).

At one of our first meetings with the Little Monster’s DSHS social worker four years ago, she voiced her concern, while she and LM’s current foster mother stared pointedly at me, that “family of origin issues” would very likely arise within a year of parenting to bite us all in the ass (not her exact words). MIM was like a rock star at those meetings, with his better fetchins as painted in our Home Study and his advantage of having the only beard in a room of nurturing women. The social worker also voiced her concern that I didn’t talk enough. True, I am likely the most quiet Munro, but my tartan is disgraced by the accusation.

Once again, I’d made the mistake of total honesty (which Munros are maddeningly devout about), and my clan, with its history of boisterous communication styles and alcoholism, didn’t look so hot on the Home Study. I had not sugar-coated my brothers’ troubled teenaged years, which seemed to prove that my family’s dysfunction was ruinous. The irony is that despite a different upbringing, MIM’s troubled teenaged years were an exact photocopy of my brothers’. The difference is that my family has a good memory (which we are happy to use against anyone who has wronged us) while his has amnesia. Plus they are sneakier…his parents still don’t even know about what MIM and his brother were really up to as teenagers, and none of that was in the Home Study.

My family is operatic, while his is a silent film, so both are histrionic in their own way. Neither is perfect, both are dysfunctional (I’d like to meet a family that isn’t), yet both sets of parents maintained long-term marriages and raised three successful children who contribute to society and are in stable relationships. So who is to judge?

But guess what? The social worker was right. Only she got the wrong family of origin. MIM’s family began to self-combust within three months of the Advent of the Little Monster and completely fractured within two years, because they didn’t agree with MIM’s parenting style but couldn’t talk about it (so, according to proud tradition, they blamed the female in-law, lucky me).

MIM’s tolerance of loud drama has increased with the Advent of the Little Monster, who is so talented at loud drama that he will someday be on a stage, bringing down the house.

With the proof in the pudding that the communication style of MIM’s family hasn’t turned out so well, I felt that it would be healthy to start disagreeing in front of the Little Monster—but in a style somewhere in between what MIM and I had grown up with. LM needed to learn that people could disagree without showing contempt, hurling insults, or hitting each other—which is all he’d seen—and that people could be angry yet still love each other and not get violent or leave. The women’s movement, among others, has shown us that healthy anger can show belief in oneself and the right to be treated with respect, and it can bring about positive change. LM had seen only two extremes: the “shut the fuck up, you fat bitch, here’s a taste of my fist” view and the other extreme of us, the forever mom and dad who never, ever disagreed, which leads to the idea that happy relationships are magic, not hard work full of discussion and compromise.

But since the hives, MIM and I still can’t agree on whether or not to disagree in front of the Little Monster.

So for now we’ve agreed to disagree.

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The Strangler Fig: Stories by Jennifer D. Munro
Now on Kindle at Amazon.com

Six sensual, darkly fantastic tales that reimagine classics such as Dorian Gray, Helen of Troy, and The Yellow Wallpaper. The Erotica Writer’s Husband & Other Stories author turns to a darker eros with her new collection of haunting and magical tales, which have appeared in various fantasy, horror, and literary anthologies.

Cover image courtesy of Rhonda “Shellbelle” Renee © 2009, ShellbellesTikiHut.com