don't marry her fuck me

Dear Marianne,

We made a vain attempt at sex this morning - a stab, you may say - only to be interrupted by Anna, shouting from downstairs, (where she was supposedly being looked after by the Cbeebies channel) "What do pigs eat?!"
"Apples!" we both shouted back, with a little more venom than I think was warranted. But we don't get many opportunities for sex, and I do mean sex, making love is just a made up thing you see in the cinema (whatever a cinema is). And we have so often over the years had coitus interruptus from children, though the most spectacular has to go to Becky's phone call intervention from her Dad's house. We had an entirely empty home, but as soon as that phone rang I knew two things, 1. I should have pulled the phone line out before we started and 2. That it would be Becky, her sex radar was amazing - and it didn't surprise me that she had sensed we were "at it" from ten miles away.

I promised myself, and silently Craig too, that I wouldn't mention sex in our correspondence, but it takes up a lot of our lives, not, unfortunately, in a physical sense. We spend a great deal of time talking about how we used to take it for granted, how we used to do "it" a lot, we discuss how often it was simply spontaneous - yes drink induced - and how little of it involved micro planning, unless we were attempting something daring such as an outside moment. If we didn't manage to get it together for a while that was OK we would catch ourselves up over the next few weeks. So today, we discuss sex in the past tense and sex in the future tense, and the future is pictured as small windows of opportunity when children are asleep, at nursery or stupidly, like this morning, just far enough away in our tall house not to notice us.

These windows of opportunity are desperately difficult to organise, but every now and again we pull it off (I know, I know), and feel like adults with a life and a future. It's the same for a friend of mine who manages an illicit fag in her design room (shed in garden)once a day, whilst her sons watch CARS and feed on snacks rich in salt. I have another friend who is working towards a BA in History with the Open University - she's doing it part time so should be done by 2020 and another friend - what am I saying, I don't have three friends I have pre-school age children. The rest of the women I know are all Mothers of other children, not friends, definitely not friends, more like enemies really. Anyway, the point is when your life is hour after hour of monotony filled by children and Fimbles, Runaround ("fun" indoor play park)making castles with bog roll tubes, trying to get the little darlings to eat cheese by offering them something called cheesestring and wet pants (their's not mine - well sometimes mine)then you tend to look on the few minutes without all this as sacred time - time to be spent doing ADULT things. Even if you do just want to eat sweeties and watch Charlie and Lola, you know you can't you absolutely MUST do something grown up - it is your responsibility to all the others who suffer too.

So sex, and fags and rock and roll (hey that would make a good title for a song)and beer and swearing and films with ADULT CONTENT and going to the Theatre to see rubbish and going to the cinema to see The Queen, a film you would NEVER have considered when you felt you had a choice, and getting drunk on two bottles of wine in half an hour on your first night out in four months - and calling the husband of that woman from NCT classes a cunt and not remembering why. This is what we must do, this is what we have to do, until we have life's blood, that is TIME, returned to us. Good luck everybody - go forth and for God's sake, don't multiply.

Rx