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Humping
U PAGE
TWO: The key thing about the marital relations to which I was exposed was that they occurred AFTER my parents had decided to call off their actual marriage. Which explains why I thought that if I barged into my mother's room early in the morning she would be alone, doing something that I wouldn't so very, very much mind seeing, like, say, skinning babies. Instead, I found she and my father enthusiastically trying to work out their differences, or ignore their differences, or wrap their legs around their differences... in any case, it was much, much worse than the baby skinning scenario. A few minutes after I hastily shut the door, walked a few laps around the house, and tried to figure out if the whole thing was good or bad news, my dad walked into my room in his worn-through, knee-length nightdress (how could she have resisted?) smiled sheepishly, and managed: "At least we weren't fighting." But, alas, this heartwarming truce was not to last. And so, at thirteen, a new lesson was learned: humping can't save a marriage. My mom and dad were now single, which lead to perhaps the only thing more upsetting than walking in on your parents humping: walking in on only one of your parents humping someone who is not your parent. Undergraduate Work, Years 15-18 My mom and I started dating at the same time. She had married my dad, her first real love, a few days after her twentieth birthday, and he had been her one and only for the next eighteen years. So when I was fifteen and she was thirty-eight, we each went on our first dates. "Who the hell is going to go out with her?" my best friend, Tasha, and I wondered about my petite, pretty, charismatic and successful mother, who when she wasn't working hundred hour weeks as a corporate attorney was skiing, scuba diving, and preparing gourmet meals. "I feel so bad. I hope she's not jealous when I start having lots of dates and she doesn't," I added, dipping another Oreo into peanut butter and shoving it into my pudgy, acne-speckled face. "Kill me if I'm trying to find a guy when I'm in my thirties." Surprisingly, my mom did okay. Like, Sex and the City okay. She even had cute, objectifying nicknames for the guys she dated: Donut Man (he introduced himself by buying her a donut), Cape Man (he came to their first and only date unironically wearing a cape), Nervous Breakdown in the Caracas Airport Man (self-explanatory.) And then, one day, came a man who didn't have a nickname, and that's when we knew she was in love. Unfortunately, his real name sounded like a nickname -- Sachi -- and, after a couple of years of bliss, he would irreparably break her heart, leading to a cute post-mortem nickname: "Promiser of Everything and Deliverer of Nothing." My mother met Sachi when she was working for a few weeks at a law firm in Mexico City. He was a Hungarian-born, Harvard-educated, Mexican businessman, and their romance was of the jet-in-for-the-weekend-bearing-pearls-and-roses variety. (But don't worry about the other single girl in our household. I was having plenty of my own epic romances of the wine-coolers-under-lifeguard-tower-six-while-getting-felt-up-by-someone's-out-of-town-cousin variety.) The first time I met Sachi, however, was long before he Delivered Nothing, and was, in fact, right in the middle of him Delivering Everything to my mother in the comfort of our living room. Luckily, my mother intercepted me somewhere in between naked Sachi and the front door, and, pulling on a robe, whisked me into my bedroom so that Prince Nothing Deliverer could pull one on, too. After everyone got properly introduced ("Yeah, hi, why don't we shake hands after your shower, huh?") my mom delivered the most important lesson from Humping U, the piece that, as I navigate the wildly dreaded waters of finding a man in my thirties, continues to flummox me: "Dating in your thirties is different than it is in high school. It's kind of all or nothing. Grownups don't just hold hands." She then talked to me about how while she would be actively exploring her every sexual impulse for the first time in her life, I should be actively ignoring mine until I was well into adulthood or at least out of the house. "But I am sorry this happened, sweetie," my mom said sheepishly. "Next time, call." Then she went back to the man whose non-nicknamed name would eventually become the nickname that the women in my family use to this day to describe other Promisers of Everything and Deliverers of Nothing: they're Sachis. One rainy Sunday, not long after Sachi left, my mother and I sat through our twenty-third viewing of Dirty Dancing. At the end of what was, and maybe still is, my all time favorite losing it scene in American cinema, when a still-large-nosed Jennifer Gray asks a shirtless Patrick Swayze to "dance with her," which boy oh boy does he ever do and how, I turned to my wildly depressed, afghan-wrapped mother and sighed, "Well, it doesn't get any better than that." She then gave me advice which I'm sure she hoped would save me years of heartache looking for what she had just lost: "Kristin, it doesn't get that good." Graduate Degree, Still Pending So,
this mishmash of education adds up to one real question: What is
it exactly that grownups are supposed to do? Despite two and a half
decades of humping research, I maybe don't know any more than I
did under the tree with Jason and the mudpies. So, as the education
process continues, I hold hands with some, I don't just hold hands
with others, and I wait for Patrick Swayze, stubbornly refusing
to believe my mother's homework help that it doesn't get that good.
I mean, my grandma found someone she still wanted to hump at eighty,
right?
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And
they dropped it! I had figured it out myself, and, having convinced
them of this, we all peacefully existed in this place of non-communication
for a few happy years. And then one day I walked into their bedroom
without knocking, and discovered that the mechanics of this humping
business was not even close to the whole story.
