365 Nights (3 page)

While I stood sorting plastic forks and spoons shaped like animals, I was reflective. I simply assumed this would enhance our relationship, but I had to wonder: What if it didn't? What if this was a mistake that ranked up there with my mustache-bleaching incident? What if I couldn't follow through? What if Brad couldn't? What if it didn't do anything to enhance our relationship but simply created stress? What if we grew sick of it and, likewise, sick of each other? What if having more intimacy didn't really make a difference? And while I didn't think this experiment could do any extreme damage, perhaps some nice cuff links would have done the trick.

I mean, on one level I knew Brad wouldn't do anything crazy like leave me—barring something horrendous like infidelity—he had told me as much. But on another, I didn't quite believe it. It wasn't that I didn't believe
him
—I knew his passionate assertion was from the heart. Rather, I was suspect of any rational person's ability to make the claim in the first place. How can any of us know what life will be like ten or twenty or thirty years from now? I was committed to the idea of staying married, but as trite as it sounds, there are simply no guarantees, despite wedding vows to the contrary. In some ways this put me on notice—it nudged me out of marital complacency and into this experience, I guess. But what if I jumped out of the complacency pot into the “Oh no! What in tarnation have I done?” fire? Of course, we'll grow closer, I thought, how could we
not
?

I was getting a little jittery, and it occurred to me more than once, as we approached Brad's birthday, that perhaps these were issues I should have considered earlier. Ah, hindsight.

JULY

Fireworks

It was an inauspicious start to Brad's birthday. We were on our annual vacation in the mountains at my parents' house. Dreamy, huh? Wait, it gets better . . . In addition to my parents and my children, my brother, his wife, their toddler, and their new baby were there, too—a family affair, to say the least.
Très romantique, non?
So this was not exactly a secluded, lovey-dovey place to kick off having sex with your husband daily for a year, but hey, a birthday gift is a birthday gift, right? It was a standing tradition that we spend the week of July Fourth up in the glorious mountain town of Asheville. Not even my offer was going to push this trip aside. Perhaps it was sleeping in my old bedroom on July second, the night before Brad's birthday, that made me worry whether I could pull off this endeavor. It had been redecorated since I'd moved out, but my flute was still in the closet, along with my high school yearbooks and my wedding dress, professionally cleaned and packed away for who knows what.

Surrounded by the stuff of old dreams and tossed-aside possessions, I had some lingering doubts as I surveyed the site of what was to be our first attempt at intimacy every day. I mean, if I could throw away my daily commitment to that flute so easily (and I did . . . snap, just like that), couldn't I just as easily dismiss this whole 365-nights-o'-pleasure thing? I didn't want Brad to think that I was reneging on my offer, because I wasn't, but I did want to be honest with him. What if we didn't make it? What if, instead of this being the great year that I had envisioned . . . it turned into the year where Brad chuckled and said, “Char, remember when you made me that great offer and then retired twelve days later?”

Arg.

Brad's suggestion of tossing aside my birthday offer and enjoying a gourmet dinner sounded nice, but it would be only marginally adequate, and we both knew it. I took some nice deep breaths, centered myself, and got back in the Sex Every Day Zone. I could do this. I had promised some serious once-in -a-lifetime action to my husband and I could not be an Indian giver on this one.

This reminded me of a time during our engagement when I was backpedaling for a different reason. Brad was engaged before we met, and I was a little unnerved by that, not because I had concerns about the former fiancée, but rather, what if he changed his mind about getting married, again?

And that exchange changed the course of our relationship. From then on, I worked harder to make sure that this lovely man who would never, ever leave me had a great life, not in spite of me, but because of me. And while I failed miserably at times, he had faith in me. I had tempted him with this offer of my own making, and he let me know that he wasn't going to let me do it unless I really wanted to. This was all the reassurance I needed. “Don't be silly. It's going to be great.” And with that, I was ready.

There was much to do to prepare, for the actual birthday, I mean. In addition to Brad's birthday, my family gathered to celebrate birthdays for my brother and my daughter. We were surrounded by a dizzying number of birthday dinners, cakes, celebrations, and gifts. There was a whole red, white, and blue color scheme going on, which has always bummed out my baby brother, who swears red cake icing tastes different. He should know as he's had a red, white, and blue birthday cake every year for the last thirty-four years.

Fourth of July parades, cookouts, fireworks, and family birthdays, and you've got a fairly typical July vacation with the Mullers . . . one big, happy family affair. But this year, things felt different for me. Sure, I was nervous about my gift to Brad, but I was also excited. I'd never taken on this kind of commitment before that hadn't fizzled out. Besides employment and marriage, I can't think of anything I've done for an entire year—by choice.

“How in the world will you do it, Char?”
I asked myself. There were so many variables to manage—time, energy, availability, nosy kids, ringing phones, housework—the list of distractions was really, truly endless. Even though we had worked out some of the logistics beforehand, the best-laid plans can go amiss. Normally, our mountain vacations included dinner with friends, lots of time at the pool, golf for the guys, some shopping, and serious family time with my parents and brother. Now, we had to incorporate a daily tryst in a bedroom loaded with tons of nostalgia, including a giant nightshirt from high school tucked in the drawer, ready for wear. It featured a mammoth pink ice cream cone and the words MY DIET STARTS TOMORROW emblazoned on the front. That bedroom did not at all ooze romance, I tell you, including the fact that it was attached to our kids' room via a bath.

But despite my worries, this annual mountain retreat became a giggly, sweet, and fun reintroduction to some revved-up intimacy. The only questions we had to answer were: “Will we do it this morning, this afternoon, or this evening?” I was more relaxed about the chances of our kids interrupting us, because they were so preoccupied with cousins and grandparents and all the play, fun, and games they could ever want, they wouldn't for a moment wonder where we had gotten to. In fact, there was so much chaos and entertainment in that house that no one missed us a bit when we slipped upstairs on our own. I'm happy to report that we did indeed make our kickoff a little flirty and definitely romantic, even while in the mountains with my entire family. Do wonders ever cease?

Some say that it's very easy to be happily married on vacation, but it's much harder to pull it off in the real world. Which is why honeymoons were invented, don't you think? And of course, it's true. On vacation, the stress of everyday life dims in the background of being together. There was no homework to finish, no lunches to pack, no clothes to launder, no meetings to staff, and no conference reports to write. Instead there was golf, massages, long walks, longer dinners, great wine, reading the newspaper, doing a puzzle, and the chance to sleep in (but who can actually sleep in anymore, right?). Even on the drive home from vacation, you can still bask in the glow of a great time together (until your kids get carsick driving down the mountain). But the memories remain. And in our case, the memories of our summer vacation in Asheville remained, too.

However, when our big SUV rolled back into our driveway, the sweet vacation was over. It's amazing how quickly the thrill of vacation is stripped away by forty-three messages in your e-mail box, thirteen more on your voice mail, a spastic cat who is mad that you left and madder that you came home, pounds of mail piled on your counter and sliding onto the floor, some dead plants, and a slightly weird house odor (I know you've had one, too, don't deny it).

It was crunch time—I had to figure out how to live the chaos of everyday life and how to keep my promise to my husband.

So I started at the most logical point—my to-do list. Like everyone juggling marriage, kids, a husband, a semigreat career, a house, church commitments, preschool events, and the occasional girls' night out, my hand cramped before I could even finish writing the list. My to-do list is a work of art, by the way. It is created by hand each week and has three key areas: a day-by -day list; a list of things I need to get done on any one of those days; and a work section that lists all my business commitments. I cross-reference my Kinko's photo calendar with my weekly to-do list to ensure I've not missed anything, and both tools accompany me almost everywhere. As a result, I've got a day-at-a -glance, a week-at-a-glance, and a month-at-a-glance. (I thought about a minute-at-a-glance, but I know when to say when.)

Despite all this preparation for my life, you'd be amazed at how much I still miss and don't get to. And don't pooh-pooh me, and say, well, if you had a BlackBerry or an iPhone or a Palm Pilot, you'd get it all done, and have constant pinging reminders. First, I'm just not that kind of girl. I need a broad visual landscape to see what I have going on, and a tiny little screen with those little thumbing motions just isn't for me. There is something therapeutic in writing it all down. And second, you high-tech planners miss about as much as I do anyway.

Brad's schedule, as the head of marketing for a large manufacturer, is pretty consistent. He leaves early, and unless there is some nutty emergency at work, or a sales dinner, he is home for dinner with me and the kids at 6 P.M. every night. So our opportunities for sex are: morning, before he leaves for work and before the kids wake up; or evening, after the kids fall asleep; and on the weekends, when schedules miraculously mesh and both kids are at a playdate and/or birthday party and we can hunker down in the house . . .
all alone.
Since I am not a morning person, and our kids are up and about getting ready for school, I was pretty much certain that this was going to leave our nightly hours to making whoopee.

This all meant that I had to get organized. Brad and I didn't always agree on how to manage a house—we still don't. But we both agree that neither of us was very good at it at first (and my mother would contend that we still aren't). Negotiating household priorities and chores was hard, as are all things that symbolize power and control. There are a few things he does—occasionally mow, take out the garbage and recyclables, pay the bills, service the cars; and a lot of things I do—cook, make the beds, do the laundry, water the plants; and things on which we tag team—unload the dishwasher, get the kids to bed, tidy up, and so on. Getting to a place where we could manage quiet evenings of “us time”—when the kids weren't waking up crying and the bills weren't getting filed, took a few years of trial and error, but it was a victory that moved us a few steps closer to the giving of The Gift. So when it came to some key logistical issues, we aligned the planets in our favor.

One thing that doesn't make my Kinko's calendar or the weekly to-do list is cleaning. It's just not a huge priority and I'm not that good at it. I am, however, tidy, which is quite different from clean, according to my clean-freak girlfriends. I drive Brad nuts when I sweep the trash, dust, and dead bugs into the corner and prop the broom on top as if to hide it. It will sit there for days and I will add to the sweep pile, until finally Brad scoops pounds of dirt and debris into the dustpan. “You have done ninety percent of the work! I don't understand why you can't close the deal.” Ahhh, story of my life, friend. In fact, I loved when my friend moved into an older house in an historic neighborhood and said, “You know what I love best about this house? It has dust in the corners . . . and always will. That's just how old houses are.” I couldn't agree more.

But as I said, I am tidy. Like most moms, order comes from necessity because it lends a certain degree of sanity. I wasn't always this way. In fact, I was a slob of great proportions in my single life. I could keep up with my business pretty well despite the clothes piled on the floor, the unopened mail (Bills? I have bills?), the mildewing laundry, and the three inches of dust on my lampshades (and I thought that lamp had a dimmer!). There was even this embarrassing story my senior year where I think I managed to change my sheets just once the
entire
semester. Totally gross, I know now, but on that military-style top bunk, it was really hard to tell they weren't in tip-top shape. My mother came on parents' weekend and was so horrified she had them washed and back in place before Senior Brunch the next day.