Poached Eggs
On the Warped Sex Lives of Parents with Small Children
The story I’m going to tell you happened around 2007 when I first started blogging. David and I had been married a short while. Lucy was 3 (now 18) Edie was 2 (now 16). We lived in NYC on 145th Street. Raffi (now 11) and Desi (now 7) weren't born yet.
This story is about us trying for baby number 3, which we thought would happen magically like the first 2 times. Uh, no. Having sex with 2 kids under 2 meant becoming stunt people, dreamers, people who were super frustrated by the antics we had to go through to have alone time.
Well, actually this story isn’t about us at all because I would never discuss our sex, or attempts at sex, here. Embarrassing!
No, this story is about another couple…. Pim and um, Ravid.
That’s right. Pim and Ravid Boster. And how they tried to have sex while also having 2 kids under 2. Please enjoy….
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Pim was ovulating.
And she and Ravid really wanted to have another baby, so they decided to use an ovulation predictor which would tell them the two very best days to have sex so they could stream-line their efforts. The two lines showed up on the indicator as expected and Ravid and Pim were a-go. They got up at 6 am to pursue what we will now call “The Activities” before the children woke up.
But before The Activities could get underway, one child, we’ll call her Meedie, woke up and wanted to hang out with Pim and Ravid. And also wanted breakfast. This put a serious damper on The Activities. Then, Pim had to go out and move the cars all around and attend to alternate side of the street parking. Because this was NYC and parking your car on alternate side parking days was like the side job you didn’t know you’d get by moving there.
Ravid and Pim decided that Ravid would try to get Meedie back to sleep, while Pim parked the cars and they would meet back in the bedroom in exactly 45 minutes.
Pim and Ravid were determined. They were going to have The Activities no matter what.
So, then Pim parked the cars, and came back to the apartment with a hopeful heart only to find Ravid sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee while both kids, Meedie, and the one we now call Poocy, jumped up and down on the bed laughing. Cackling even.
There would be no sleeping. There would be no Activities. They thought they had us.
Pim could feel her lone egg disintegrating to ash as she stood there.
Pim made breakfast. She poached eggs they had gotten upstate at a farm. The yolks were almost so orange they were like poppies. She cracked the eggs into a small bowl, spilled them into gently boiling water with a bit of vinegar. She swirled the water to make sure the egg formed a chubby teardrop. She toasted bread for scooping the hot yoke-y middle. She was poaching her husband’s eggs, she thought, and she knew this was probably a metaphor for something, but she couldn’t quite make it fit. Anyway, Ravid signals that he has this idea that they should try again when the babysitter arrives at 9am and maybe this will help The Activities.
Ravid whispered the plan to Pim. Pim agreed. Pim considered telling the babysitter about the plan, just to get her help with things, but then thought better of it. Does a 25-year-old blonde Finnish girl really want to have the image in her head of her middle-aged employers doing the Activities?
No. Definitely not.
And so Pim and Ravid lied like incumbent politicians to their children. And to their Blonde Finnish babysitter and said goodbye like they were leaving to go somewhere.
Bye. See you later. Kiss kiss, darling!
And waited on the other side of the door, ear pressed against it, for the kids to get in the bath tub.
After waiting until everyone was thoroughly wet, and feeling just a little foolish loitering in the hallway, Pim cracked open the front door and listened. She could hear the kids were happily splashing and chatting in the tub. Pim felt a little thrill, like she was in an MI5 TV show or something.
Pim decided to use that for The Activities.
She waved Ravid in and like a sniper backing her up. Pim scurried to the arm chair, then to the table, where she sought cover and then leaped over a hassock until she found herself in the safety of the master suite. Ravid, missing out on the whole subterfuge situation, strolled through the living room checking his blackberry for last minute messages.
Whatever.
Also, yes, people had Blackberries back then.
Pim and Ravid got to the master suite undetected by the kids or the babysitter. Great. But there was no lock on the door to the master suite so the kids or the babysitter could walk in at any moment. This was not good. Both Pim and Ravid needed to concentrate. Interruptions could be catastrophic. I mean, Pim and Ravid weren’t 22 anymore. They needed to focus.
But Pim had already anticipated this problem. She came up with a solution while poaching the eggs. A lot of good ideas come from poaching. All that standing around and swirling the water, I bet. Anyway, Pim realized that the master bathroom did lock, just not the door to the whole suite, so they could have The Activities in the bathroom. So she dragged the duna off the bed and folded it into a comfy cushion between the shower door and the base of the toilet.
But there was another problem.
The lights over the bathroom mirror were very bright. Stupid bright. And if you turn them on, it was like having The Activities in the men’s khaki section at Walmart. But if you turn the lights off, it was pitch black, which is kind of like having The Activities in a coffin.
Coffin. Walmart. Coffin. Walmart.
Total toss up.
Neither was acceptable. And there really wasn’t time for a protracted debate. Eggs - the ones that do not require poaching - were sitting around waiting for a hook-up. Children were preparing to open every door and closet to find their parents. Babysitters were threatening to walk in and be mortified at Pim and Ravid’s naked sex bodies.
So Ravid decided to close the door to the bedroom suite and nearly close the door to the darkened bathroom, so that it could be snapped shut the minute the kids or the babysitter came anywhere close. Pim realized this plan also gave them a small, lone strip of light for which to help with the groping, er I mean romancin’.
Pim and Ravid were, like, geniuses.
There was some frantic undressing and Pim, in one of the most sexy and romantic gestures of her life reminded Ravid that he was on the clock and needed to “keep it moving.”
Ravid thanked her for that un-helpful up-date.
Then, Pim and Ravid made a solemn promise that no matter what kind of Activities ensued, they would be very very quiet.
And we were. I mean, Ravid and Pim were.
They were very very quiet.
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To Readers: I had fun this week going through old blog posts and found a version of this essay, which I re-jiggered and hope, I improved. I really enjoyed being funny (or trying to be). Apparently I was humorous a lot in the old days. My book is pretty serious, as are most of the essays here, so it feels good to stretch these muscles again.
I also realized that back in the day when blogging was just taking hold, it felt rebellious. It felt amazing to write about the chaos and small failures and imperfections of motherhood and not simply leave that to magazine writers giving us tips to be better, do better.
Back then the internet was filled with really raucous men and women who told it straight, without bullshit, the good and the bad of family life and family cooking. I also realize that I pretty much left a 3-post a week legacy of what our family life and our food experiences were like in the early days. Some of it was great and some unfortunate. LOL. I somehow was able to write about food at the intersection of vaginas. Food at the intersection of breastfeeding in restaurants. Food at the intersection of menses. Hidden behind the humor were real issues that families have to manage - our changing bodies, our changing habits, the politics of parenthood, the mechanics of work and family life, feeding children, feeding ourselves, the domestic and often invisible, unpaid labor, the challenge of children typical or not, the loss of self, the changing and reclaiming of the self, the community of parenthood - it was all there. And before blogging, I had never read or written anything quite like it. We were just putting it all out there. And last night, I frantically sent pictures and snippets of essays in a chat thread to the family, remembering what had been forgotten.
I’m so glad I wrote it all down.
I’m so happy to see some of the pictures I had forgotten I had taken. And stories I forgot happened. I was definitely not as skilled a writer back then but you get pretty solid writing 3 posts a week. I think I was able to be funny because I hadn’t matured enough as a non-fiction writer to go deep deep. Blogging (and newsletter writing) is such a great exercise for a writer or for becoming a writer.
I also got into some thorny territory where being funny and being an expert (around cooking) didn’t gel. Because how can you make fun of yourself in the kitchen, with the duck you tried to debone in the most inelegant, mangled way possible, and the first time you tried to stuff a pork mixture into a sausage casing and not see all the stupidly-obvious sexual references, and also have the gravitas of being a solid cook? That’s why food humor is pretty scarce, I think. Food media is about a kind of perfection.
Blogging was also the Wild West, looked down on by proper writers, but appealing to the masses, because we (the masses) have to be in it together. Our stories and experiences are worthy. And we had to laugh about it all. I mean cooking can be an exercise in the ridiculous, for sure.
Sometimes writers talk in chat rooms about not wanting to be called bloggers or newsletter writers. But I love it. I revel in it. It feels rebellious. Again. I can fucking say anything kinda and no one can stop me. I write for my people, whoever they might be, and myself. I was happy to be called a blogger and I’m pretty damned happy to be a newsletter writer.
