“You will never have sex (or at least not good sex) ever again!” I wanted to scream at the annoying love doves.
The cameras followed as the couple went out for a “last supper”. As soon as the waiter began to recite the wine list, Mrs. Bun-in-the-Oven rubbed her stomach and said, “We can’t. We're expecting.”
OMG. Her hubby was so emasculated, I couldn’t figure out how he got her pregnant in the first place. I’m not a drinker (though I’ve dated plenty, and can attest to the damage alcohol can do to relationships) but I’d never play Ms. Prohibition, either, especially on my husband’s final night of freedom. The man may never experience joy again, honey! Let him have a beer! Jesus!
After a commercial break, the baby was born. Close-ups ensued of this little butterball with those delicious folds of fat and serene smile and incessant need to nuzzle and…aww…
WTF? Was that a (gulp) maternal twinge?
Ambivalence abounded. To add to the stress, not five minutes after publishing the Up In The Air post, Slump Buster (SB) texted me: “Less than impressed.”
With what, exactly? My waxing poetic about how much I miss you? I didn’t get why he was so pissed off at me. I'd completely exposed my most private thoughts while he remained an emotional oyster!
I wanted to stomp on my cell phone-—but didn’t, lest he come to his senses and actually call me to discuss the molehill that had blown up into a monstrous misunderstanding. I hadn’t even mentioned the missing period yet--and I certainly wasn’t going to do it via text.
I decided to give him the cold shoulder…
…but I suck at the indifference game. So I replied, immediately, with “Ditto.”
As soon as I flipped my phone shut, there was a knock on my hotel room door. Thank God for girlfriends. M, perhaps the only woman I can relate to 100%, had arrived to whisk me off to VooDoo Doughnuts.
I expected the bakery, which is infamous for its namesake pastry and sexy slogan “The magic is in the hole” to be flashier than it was. In fact, its sign was simple and barely visible from a block away. Inside, there was one table, a spinning display of the day’s doughnuts, and a counter. For its reputation, the ambiance was anti-climactic.
But the doughnuts…ohhhhh…the doughnuts were pure food porn. Raised pastries slathered in various shades of frosting and topped with sprinkles, kids’ cereals, crumbled cookies, and candy spun round and round in hypnotic fashion.
The shapes were just as kitschy as the flavors. Aside from a gigantic glazed hole, there were the trademark “cock and balls” doughnuts filled with cream, luscious maple bacon long johns, and little chocolate men bearing the initials VD with pretzel stakes through their hearts that bled raspberry preserves upon first bite.
I bought half a dozen doughnuts of different varieties, which were packed in a pretty pink box, and M and I trekked in the rain to a coffee shop.
Over an equally attractive mocha (It doesn’t take much to impress Man Eater. I’m a sucker for that leaf-shaped cream trick.) I tucked into a cinnamon doughnut with red sprinkles while M nibbled on a strawberry-frosted concoction with marshmallows in the middle.
Out of the blue (though my mind had been fearing double pink lines for days, natch) the conversation shifted to teen pregnancy. M launched into the story of a girl who’d gotten pregnant on purpose with the understanding that she and the father were going to get married. Once the seed was planted, however, he bolted. By the time the baby was born, deadbeat dad had gotten engaged to someone else. (This must be where the term “bastard child” came from!)
I do not consider myself a particularly compassionate person, especially not when it comes to teenagers too naïve to know that babies rarely improve, and often ruin, relationships. But my heart ached as M told this story because for once, I could see myself getting stuck in a similar situation.
I hadn’t told anyone about my pregnancy concerns (well, besides hinting to all of cyberspace in a previous post), because I was embarrassed. I already have two children and don’t feel the need to have more. How did I get into this pickle? (Hmm…maybe that’s my answer right there.)
I wasn’t sure M would understand my dilemma because she is on the opposite end of the mother hunger spectrum. She doesn’t have kids and desperately wants them; for her, an unplanned pregnancy would be a happy accident.
Instead of tsk-tsking, M affirmed that she was the same way. “The only time I was really careful was when I was married,” she said. “Which doesn’t make sense because we never had sex anyway.”
(My situation with my ex-husband exactly!)
“It’s our bodies,” M said. “That’s what we’re wired to do.”
But I thought my body preferred to be lithe and active, not bloated and child-bearing!
“You don’t want to see me any more hormonal than I already am,” I joked.
M reassured me that all would fine, that the 30 day cycle was probably just a menstrual glitch. When we said goodbye on the corner, I teased that if she was wrong, I’d drop off my latest spawn in a basket on her doorstep sometime around the holidays.
I returned to my hotel room with my big pink box of doughnut booty to find another disgruntled text from SB, saying that until I acknowledged the importance of his job, there was nothing more for us to discuss.
Say what?! I know that jobs in this economy are as Unicorn-rare as eligible bachelors. If you’ve got one, you better hold on to it with both hands! But for any man to act as though he didn’t have two evenings a week to eat a meal with me and give me a lil' lovin' is bullshit. No one works that much--especially at a job they dislike! Another woman must've been keeping him company…and if that was the case, why didn't he just say so? Don’t string me along! Don’t make me waste the pretty!
ARG!
I didn't want to waste the rest of my vacation texting mean-spirited shit back and forth. To keep my hands off the phone, I photographed my kinky VooDoo doughnuts.
I wasn’t going to eat another one, truly! (Some may hate me for saying this, but the doughnut part of VooDoo doughnuts is nothing special. Their doughnuts taste like, well, doughnuts. The extraordinary part are the toppings.)
But…anger was eating me up inside, so I responded, naturally, by eating. I went straight for the cock.
It was dry and disappointing, but I finished it all the same because it was a metaphorical F.U. to a situation I had no control over. (I saved the balls, because someone was obviously in need of a pair.)
The evening continued its downward spiral. The pix of my offensive edibles took an eternity to upload. Then I accidentally tagged a Facebook friend (and men’s magazine writer with a lot more authorial clout than me) in the cock-and-balls photo. (I shit you not. So embarrassing.) Because of the bad Internet connection, it took another five minutes for me to un-tag him. By that time, I feared it had been posted to his wall for all to see. Nice networking move, Erica!
Feeling as crummy as a dry doughnut (that pun’s for you, babe), I texted my guy with a “Can we call a truce?” style message.
As all the sugar and yeast hit my system, I was at once totally wiped out and totally wired. I knew it was either time to go to bed and sleep it off or hit the gym to burn it off. I did the latter with a few rounds of weight-lifting. There is no place lonelier than a hotel gym at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. Still, when my muscles popped, I was satisfied that at least I looked like I could kick my man’s ass if I wanted to. Not that I wanted to. (I would have rather...well, you know...)
Finally, bedtime arrived. As for Aunt Flo? Still absent...
The conclusion to my Portland adventure (and the are-we-breaking-up debacle?) in my next post!
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