Free 365 Nights by Charla Muller Page A

sharp and pointy details of your future. Of living with a spouse who isn’t perpetually in a good mood (has he always been this grumpy?). Of raising babies who don’t want to sleep (from whose gene pool is this kid?). Of living with neighbors who are just as bleary-eyed as you are, and not nearly as charming as you had hoped (like you, they were so much fun before kids).
    Once our children debuted, the impact they had on our sex lives was significant. We went from lovely sex several times a week to . . . [insert chirping cricket noises here]. So while I was aware of the drastic change in our sex life, it was trumped by this amazing brand-new human life! Nothing was more important than keeping alive this small person who weighed only nine pounds. Nine pounds?! You have no idea how small and fragile babies are, and how many things can go wrong with small and fragile babies—it’s enough to haunt you in your sleep. Which it does—all the time—to first-time mothers. I briefly worried, in between all the other worries that I had as a new mother, whether this was a blip on the sex screen or whether, after I finally let the dust settle around the last box of Huggies, this was going to be a permanent state of affairs.
    My sense of desirability went bye-bye after I had a baby. A few moments that led me down into the valley of Motherhood, as a friend so astutely observed, included: when the ladies at the Lancôme counter started to call me “ma’am”; when my hairdresser threw up his hands and announced, “I’m at a complete loss to help you”; when I realized that I’m no longer the “young hotshot” at work; when my husband asked me if women think Angelina Jolie is as hot as men do (the answer is yes); and when my need for sleep grew exponentially greater than my need for sex.
    Yes, the list is tediously long. But there’s one moment that confirmed just how much I had changed in the last few years and how unglamorous and unsexy I had become:
    I’m driving down the street and listening to Anita Baker’s “Giving You the Best That I Got,” which is a languorously sexy song. Sadly, it does not occur to me that the song has absolutely no relevance to me, Brad, or my sex life. Rather, I am basking in the sun, the kids are at preschool, and I’m thrilled that I don’t have to listen to Radio Disney. I am happy, relaxed, and feeling good. The window is down and I have on some très trendy sunglasses. I might even have managed to slap on some lip gloss, making it a banner day. I pull up to a stoplight, and see a cute, sharply dressed, sexy man sitting in a luxury car next to me. I wonder about him, and whether he would think I might be remotely cute, and I smile nonchalantly and dreamily (disinterested, of course, because I am a happily married woman . . . who’s now intimate every day with her husband, too!), but I like to think that maybe, just maybe, on this breezy day in September, I’ve still got it. That perhaps I can be married, a mother of two, and still be attractive to men.
    And then I realize, I don’t still got it. That in reality, I am towering over this attractive man, looking down into his luxury BMW from the great height of my monster, Mom-sized SUV. And that I and my two booster seats and my crapload of Happy Meals toys, chewed-up crayons, socks, cat fur, hair bows, and “artwork” from last year don’t really cut it. It was a disconcerting realization that I had sitting up high in my ungainly SUV that gets about twelve miles to the gallon. I scrunched down in my seat and changed the station to clear my head of the shocking awkwardness of it all.
    However, I will say this: I don’t care how ridiculous and unsexy I felt at that moment in my big, honkin’ SUV, because at least I will not ever, ever drive a minivan. I don’t care how practical they are, how highly rated they are, how great the resale