LITMIR.BIZ

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raised Catholic, and if anyone could send you on an all-expenses paid mom-guilt trip to the moon and back any day of the week, it was the Catholics.

      She had somehow managed to position herself to be a forty-one-year-old woman who was cheating on both her forty-five-year-old husband and her fifty-three-year-old lover with her twenty-eight-year-old intern. Her sex drive aside, it was Eva’s workaholism that really drove her. Her career as a corporate attorney was both successful and demanding, and she often wondered if all the steam she put into the corporate machine during her long workweeks was exactly the steam she was blowing off with her various creative sexual outlets.

      Suddenly the phone rang again.

      Without looking at the dashboard, Eva purred, “How may I help you?” in a seductive voice.

      “EEE-vah?” asked her husband, Joe. Her name was pronounced “ee-vah” though people often mispronounced it “Ay-va.” When Joe thundered the word, the first half sounded like it was being shouted in a capital letter: EEE-vah.

      Eva was snapped back into her reality like a branch in a thunderstorm. She unknowingly shifted her driving position. Where she had been reclining back into her leather seats, sunroof open, hair blowing in the wind, she now sat upright, straightened and stiffened. “Hey Joe,” Eva replied, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

      “What’s up is that your sons just got busted behind the school football field bleachers drinking beers.”

      Eva winced at the way Joe referred to their sons when they were in trouble, as “your sons.” When they made state championship teams in lacrosse, he called them “my boys.”

      Joe continued. “Apparently you didn’t answer your cell phone, so the Vice Principal Ken Tracey called me to let me know they were suspended for three days. And that was after I spent fifteen minutes convincing him that they shouldn’t be expelled. So fortunately, they will make it through at least their first year of high school.”

      Eva cringed. Dreaded, ever-present mommy guilt immediately flared up. Somehow, it was her fault. She traveled too much and the boys were acting out in rebellion. Now they would do terribly in high school and then not get into good colleges. And all of that was because their mother was a wine drinking, career-obsessed sex freak and their father worked all the time.

      Eva cleared her head, and her throat, and responded, “What should we do about OUR sons?” She hated how she sounded. She couldn’t understand how she could ruin entire corporations in the courtroom without batting an eyelash, but when it came to dealing with her husband, she turned into a handkerchief-gripping 1950s housewife, complete with red and white checked apron.

      Joe replied, “Destroy their lives as they know them?”

      Eva sighed. “Have you spoken to them? What’s the rest of the story? Some older kid must’ve given them the beer. This is the first time they’ve done anything like this. We should sit down as a family and discuss it.”

      Joe bellowed, “The rest of the story? There is no rest of the story. I sent them to their rooms for the weekend. I don’t want to see their faces.”

      “So you didn’t talk to them?” inquired Eva, marveling at the fact that all her husband, a pediatric oncologist at one of the top medical institutions in the country, could muster up when the first sign of teen angst acting out appeared was a big time out chair.

      “There is nothing to say,” said Joe. “You can come home and deal with them.”

      Eva had already been debating doing a U-turn on Kent Island to head back to the Western Shore of Maryland. But this was her weekend. She hadn’t been to the island in a month, had promised her mother a visit, and she couldn’t travel there again for at least another month. Her mother honestly needed her.

      “I’ll just spend one night with Mom,” said Eva, compromising. “Tomorrow when I get home, I will speak with the boys, and I’ll text them tonight.”

      Joe laughed.

      “Why would you think they would still have phones?” He hung up.

      Eva winced and began the inevitable beating-herself-up routine. Although their father was emotionally vacant from their boys’ lives, preferring to lose himself in his work than to take his own sons to an Orioles game, Eva still blamed herself when there was a low grade on a test or a small altercation on the lacrosse field.

      Eva pulled her car over to get an iced coffee; she’d need it to get through this drive. She opened the Facebook application on her iPhone. Her husband wouldn’t realize it, but she knew the boys were fully technologically functioning without the phones. The spoiled brats each had MacBooks and iPads in their rooms, and even Internet through the Wiis on their bedroom TVs.

      She wanted to cyberstalk them a tiny bit, just a quick check of Facebook pages, to be sure they weren’t bragging about their exploits. She private messaged both of them in the same message on Facebook.

      Dear Graham and Calvin,

      Nice job, boys. Dad’s pissed and I can’t exactly say I’m a proud mom. Do not use your Facebook accounts. If I see any use on them, I’ll disable them. The last thing you need is to mess up your college chances by bragging about your little escapades. I will be home tomorrow and we can discuss this. In the meantime, be productive. Do homework! Clean your rooms! Do dishes! Don’t leave the house. Spend time thinking about how stupid of a decision you just made and how incredibly crappy your summer is going to be because of it.

      Hugs,

      Mom

      Eva sipped her coffee and pulled back onto Rt. 50. A quick visit to the island was just what she needed. Watching the sun set over the bay would help recharge her batteries for having to deal with the boys tomorrow.

      Motherhood really sucks sometimes, she thought. Hollywood’s version—all fluffy blankets and cute messy banana-eating baby faces and angelic three-year-old handprint molds—comprised about 10% of being a mother. The other 90% was temper tantrums and math homework you couldn’t understand and dealing with bickering and nagging about messy rooms and piles and piles of laundry that went on forever, because it didn’t ever end. The. Laundry. Never. Ends.

      Eva wanted to send out a public service announcement for women who, like Lisa, were struggling with infertility:

      Hey, gals! Don’t feel bad about being childless! Wanna know a huge secret that moms never talk about, because it would make us realize how miserable we really are a lot of the time? IT SUCKS! Your life is OVER! Forget sleep! Stay home with them and you’re broke! Go back to work and feel guilty, PLUS spend a fortune on childcare! You can’t take a shower for more than three consecutive minutes over the next eighteen years! You’re going to eat crap because kids eat macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets, not shrimp scampi and filet mignon! Time for you to go to the gym or read a book? Forget it. Your sex life? OVER! With your husbands, anyway…

      Boy, that would be a popular article, wouldn’t it?

      She shook her head and headed southeast.

      Early Scarlet Letter Society meeting times worked well for Lisa, because she could attend the gatherings before she opened her bakery. Her husband Jim was a real estate developer in DC, and his long commute made for lonely mornings to kill in their suburban subdivision.

      Lisa flipped open her laptop.

      Her email contained the usual junk mail, two pie orders, and the one she was looking for—a note from her graphic designer and crush, Ben. She blushed in anticipation and shame.

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from:	Ben [email protected]
to:	Lisa [email protected]
date:	Monday, April 9, 2012, 5:36 AM