The day behind us was long and difficult. I could hear it in his voice when I called to see if he was still in the mood for the dinner I had planned. The smell of the roast was just starting to waft out of the oven and would be ready about half an hour after his arrival. He walked in with his tie neatly rolled in his hand, and his worn brown leather messenger bag slung across his chest. The top buttons of his dress shirt were undone and I could see the soft tangle of light hair peeking out below the slight adam's apple that shifted under his square jawline which was already covered in a 5 o'clock shadow. I nibbled his chin just below his left ear and relieved him of his bag. I pulled him to his favorite chair. It's the overstuffed one that feels like a throne. He reads in this chair. He tells me about his day in this chair. I sit him down and pull my bathrobe tighter around me before pouring his favorite single malt whiskey over a ball of ice in an old fashioned glass with his initials acid etched on the bottom. I love his sense of style. He looks so worn and I can see the weight of his day. I kiss away the words that start because I won't continue his frustrations until we've melted the edge off a bit.

I place a towel at his feet and remove his loafers and trouser socks. I fold the legs of his slacks up and push them the rest of the way past his calves to his knees. He cocks his head to the side and the sweet crinkle of laugh lines around his eyes tell me his mood was already improving. My bare feet padded softly on thick charcoal carpeting to the bathroom where I filled the vibrating foot spa with warm water and scented bath salts. Walking back to him, his smile pulled at the edges of his mouth, but not quite his eyes. Not fully. He often wondered if he was doing enough to make me happy and if he should have been doing more.

I placed the spa before him, and he began to protest that he should be doing this for me. I give him the look of promise that he is learning to anticipate and lifted and placed each foot in the vanilla scented warm water. I plugged it in and walked away, dropping my bathrobe on the couch that had become my favorite spot to watch him. He loved it when I showed him that Victoria's Secret is that she is a man after his own heart. I could see the reflection of the smile that has now reached his eyes in the mirror above the fireplace.

I returned to him with a shallow bowl filled with rough mounds of cool coconut oil, and a stiff brush. I started scrubbing each tired foot with the brush. Once the water began to cool, I took his feet out and dried them gently before each foot took a turn being rubbed with coconut oil. I started with the bottom of his feet, kneading them with the soft pads of my thumbs. The oil softened and melted quickly from the heat of my hands and his feet. His eyes closed and I flicked the arch of his foot with the tip of my tongue while holding it firmly and I enjoyed the shock that he tried to pull away in.

"Watch," comes out more as a pout than I intended.

The heat in his gaze maintained his silence and I took his second and longest toe into my mouth and watched his expression shift from contented joy to anticipation and excitement. His eyes were on me and I continued rubbing his feet, and ankles as I worked my way up his calves. I loved his firm muscles and soft hair on my sensitive fingertips. His body relaxed and when he started to look too relaxed, I used my mouth or hands to remind him of the sexual nature of our situation. It usually resulted in a groan that tried my self control.

As he nursed his drink, I started the important questions about his day. I could feel his body relax as the stress began to fall away. He told me about his latest acquisition and the challenges of combining the two entities into a cohesive new company. I can see his excitement return to his features as he explained the unique skillsets of his teams and how they worked so well together. He alternated between being in his excitement and looking to me to make sure he could continue because there's fear that he may bore me. When we first met he wanted to talk about his accomplishments and I just wanted him to keep looking at me the way he did. I could watch this man read nutritional values on a box of cereal and still be riveted. I smiled at his slight insecurities because he can't see how amazing he is to me and I liked it that way.

The smell of our dinner was strong enough that I knew it was done. I stood up and slipped into my bathrobe so I could pull dinner out, and finished setting the table so the roast could rest. I caught his expression in the mirror again, and saw shock and petulant disappointment. He's so cute when he's disappointed.

"Dinner," I remind him.

"But we were in the middle of things."

"Dinner before dessert," was thrown over my shoulder with a smile and a wink and his smile matched mine.

12321609_1154873314546589_7704842480460367934_n

In my early 20's I had vivid dreams every night. I would wake up and scribble every detail in a spiral one subject notebook. Sometimes they made no sense whatsoever. Other times, I'd wake with clarity and my problems became puzzle pieces that fell into place. When they really had me guessing, I'd usually turn to the internet for a search and answers. These searches would tease out deeper meaning hidden in my psyche.

When I was pregnant my vivid dreams usually involved lesbian sex. I learned to just laugh at those and enjoy them for what they were. While I'm not a fan of girl kisses, my sleeping mind wasn't against them at all. I carried so many boys in my Momma belly, it might have been their hormones. The girls I carried shared enough of their hormones to give me pimples and horrible morning sickness.

I will carry the DNA of every child I carried in my womb for the rest of my life, circulating in my bloodstream. For this reason, if you've ever carried a boy, don't bother taking a gender identity test that isolates male DNA. It'll give you a false positive. Wait for a torpedo in the ultrasound when you go for the organ survey around 20 weeks.

For the last several years, I couldn't remember dreaming at all. There's a definite correlation between my ability to write and my ability to be aware of any dreams. I couldn't write for a long time. At one point, I couldn't line up a paragraph and in frustration I would scrap it in tears.

There were many times that I'd start a journal and my husband would find it and read it and be hurt and depressed by it. I hid them in the bottom of drawers and under mattresses. I taped them along the wall in our closet. Writing was a way to dump my anger, doubts and frustrations without lashing out at others. He would later read my vitriol and internalize it. Sometimes we'd talk. Sometimes what I wrote would come back as a weapon against me in an argument at a later date. Other times, it came out as anger or frustration that I would focus so intently on reading or writing that I wasn't able to give him or the kids my full attention.

In one of my many bids to win him back, I destroyed journals I had poured myself into that spanned more than two decades. I'm not upset about that. There was a lot of anger in them, and destroying them changed how I write. Changing how I write was able to shift my perspective, and I'm happier for it. Although, in my early journaling days, I was full of male bashing jokes. Bad male bashing jokes. I miss the laugh. I would write the word, "platypus," and giggle for a few minutes. My favorite insults were "hamster penis," "vulture vomit," "penis dribble," and "chicken weenie." And no, chickens don't have weenies. I love it that most days I can slip back into that teenaged me, and be silly and make people think I'm a decade younger than I am. I can dance through a song while focusing on work because I can find that joy and silliness. It's never far from me. My anger is. I have most of the poems I've written throughout my life. The darkness that filled every moment is far from me. I like who I am now, and I love that I'm not far from the silliness I used to live in, but it's been a long while since I've told someone they were being a hamster penis.

Part of loving being a student majoring in English was that I had an excuse to have to read and write. A grade depended on that and my performance would later be monetized. In theory. Still waiting on that one. I am not a fan of most literature taught in college courses. It was typically dry and boring. It took 4 valiant attempts to get through Moby Dick and I was proud of getting through it, but didn't feel like I would ever want to read it again. Children's literature with the undercurrent of moral teaching and sexual perversion was more interesting than I anticipated. You should read Little Red Riding Hood with me. It will scar you in your childhood dreams.

The other side of being a student and using school as an excuse for my bookish fix is that there wasn't room for creativity. I would read countless dull literary masterpieces during the quarter, and on breaks go through several young adult paranormal romances because my brain needed the downtime, but I couldn't plot and plan a story. I'm more of a pantser anyway, and there are major plot holes when I don't outline. I tend to see them around the 40,000 word mark and scrap my manuscript and start over. When I do plan, the writing bores me to the point that I hate revision, and if I don't want reread what I've written, it's ballsy to expect anyone to want to read it the first time through. This has happened at least six times. For some reason every time I read Twilight, I feel like I can be a writer. I can do what she did there. Then I read Harry Potter and know I'm not ready to create worlds, and "kill my darlings," as Stephen King has said or written.

So now I'm writing. Most of what I'm writing is getting published in these blog posts. Some of it stays private. I haven't started on a book yet, because I can accept I'm just not there yet. My prose isn't achingly beautiful. My thoughts are still chaotic. But I'm writing, and with the words, dreams are teasing my resting mind, and lingering each morning. It's as if by writing, I've given myself permission to access the forbidden ideas held in check by fear of hurting my husband's feelings. It's as if I have permission to work through issues and grow emotionally. And I have. You might not see it, but I do.

The best part is the way my mind can trail in opposite directions. I woke up one morning on the tail end of a sexual dream. It was tender and beautiful and not about my husband. As the ephemeral tail of a lingering touch lost its substance, words filtered through my mind, with venom and angst about the wife I was and the many ways he took my giving heart for granted. I was angry that I did it at my expense in the names of love and obedience, and his exit was about finding the happiness he deserved. They were such opposite thoughts, and they overlapped and still made sense. As overwhelming as all of those emotions were, I didn't feel overwhelmed in the least. I could evaluate both what my mind saw, and the words filtering through my mind with my eyes still closed. It was epic.

I've started lucid dreaming where in the middle of a vivid dream, I know I'm dreaming. I'm aware that what is occurring is happening in my sleep. Or sometimes I'm on the verge of drifting off and I'll feel a dream trying to pull me in and I haven't fallen asleep yet. Most recently, I was drifting off and a gentle hand on my shoulder was pulling me back for a kiss, and it was so real and not real that it woke me up. It was awesome.