Hallway Sex

Several years ago a buddy of mine mentioned, almost in passing, how for a long while after their second child was born, he and his wife had only what he called “Hallway Sex”. This is when you pass each other by in the hall and one of you yells, “F^&k you!” and the other responds with a “F&*k you, too!”

At the time, I had thought he was joking.

It’s the dirty little secret of parenthood: The little bastards suck out all your zest for life, leaving nothing but sleep-deprived, angry zombies, skilled at changing diapers one-handed in the dark, but incapable of civil discourse.

Most nights, after a day of work followed by an evening of feeding, watering, bathing, changing, putting to bed, putting back to bed, threatening, screaming, then putting to bed again, we’re exhausted. A couple glasses of wine, an episode or two of “30 Rock” on Netflix Streaming, and we're asleep by 9:00. Then up again at midnight, at 2am, 4am, then getting up for good at 5am.

Sex? Yeah, right. That’s just not in the cards, when you don’t even have enough energy to be cordial to one another.

It makes me wonder how large families can possibly exist.  Nobody with that many kids can possibly be getting any action.

How do Mormons and Catholic parents do it?

Pelvis Day

If I could have a do-over in life, I would go back and redo Sunday, February 2nd, 1997. That was the day I broke my girlfriend’s pelvis. And not in any exciting way that someone might be impressed by.



Jen and I had known each other for about a year and a half, both of us graduate students in the master’s program in psychology at Western Washington University. I’d asked her out a few times, but like so many other men like me (that is to say, neither a bad boy, nor particularly hot), she had relegated me to her “friend zone”. But after about a year of spending time together in group activities, seeing movies, cooking vegetarian meals for her, and helping her with her statistics homework, she had a change of heart. My long game worked.


We’d been dating for about six months, and things were going well. We got along, we had fun together, we had the same friends, enjoyed many of the same activities, and even the meetings of our respective families had gone pretty well. That is, until we took a ski trip together.


I’m a very poor downhill skier. Don’t have very good control or coordination. I had done cross-country skiing for years, but I suck at downhill. She wanted to go, though, so I wanted to take her. In retrospect, I think I was afraid she would consider me too geeky if I didn’t want to go. This seems strange to me now; in all the time we’ve known each other, I doubt there was ever a day that she didn’t know exactly how geeky I am. But that kind of insight takes time. For geeks like me, anyway.


We drove up to the Mt Baker ski resort, about 60 miles east of Bellingham, early on that Sunday morning. My recollection of the day is that it was gray and slick. Not great ski weather and even worse for driving windy mountain roads in the tinny Toyota Tercel I owned at the time. By the time we got there, I was already nervous and a bit worn out from the drive. Of course, I said nothing. Mustn’t be a geek.


The first hour or so went okay. We did several runs and I started to have fun. Too much fun, apparently, since I was paying attention to everything around me except for her location. I followed too closely behind her, failing to notice her sudden stop until it was too late. I plowed into her with my full weight, tackling her into the snow. She couldn’t get up afterwards. She was conscious and she could move her legs, but she couldn’t stand. And she was in a lot of pain.


For weeks afterwards I kept seeing the image of the crash in my dreams, replaying like a looped video in my head. I can even see that image now, if I think about it. But the rest is mostly a blur: getting down the hill by snowmobile...driving her down the mountain...getting her to the hospital...calling her mother to tell her about the accident...mostly all gone (thankfully!).


Fortunately, things turned out pretty well. Two months later, we ran a 10K together. She forgave me for the accident and (after several years) so did her mother. We moved to Pennsylvania together about six months later, and life went on. Now, on the anniversary of the event, I send her an E-card with a photo of Elvis Presley to commemorate Pelvis day.

But I absolutely hate to ski. And my criteria for evaluating ski trips have changed. Nobody hospitalized is a good day on the slopes.

3 Years "Back East"

We lived in Pennsylvania from 1997 until 2000.  Our first year was the hardest, as we didn’t care for our apartment, Jen was (initially) unemployed, and we hadn’t yet made many friends. My main focus was on school, but I gave her as much time and energy as I could on evenings and weekends.  I think she resented having to rely on me for so much, because she had always been very independent, with her own large network of friends.  She filled some time with the occasional crafting class (jewelry making) and focused her energy on fitness and finding work. 

Her first job was as a counselor at a residential treatment facility for teenage boys – essentially a private juvenile detention facility.  These were boys from bad homes with few positive role models and fewer resources.  She helped those she could, but most were poor therapy candidates, well on the way to becoming little sociopaths.  Within six months, she found a job as the undergraduate academic counselor for the university’s psychology department. This was much better, as we were working in the same department, interacting with many of the same people, and her job conditions were infinitely more pleasant.

Things improved over time.  Our second year we found a much better apartment.  We brought home a kitten (a gray little imp I named Gwarsh – still here 14 years later, though slower), we made more friends, drove throughout the mid-Atlantic and New England, and gradually got used to our lives there.  But Jen was never really happy – partly because she felt displaced from her home and friends, and partly because she felt her graduate training was going to waste.  I felt guilty that her unhappiness was because of the choice to come with me, and I hated feeling that way.

In the winter of 1999, she decided to go back to school for her doctorate in clinical psychology.  Two years of counseling undergraduates on how to pursue graduate degrees was enough to convince her to go back for another one herself.  She jumped through all the hoops, wrote the applications, did the interviews, and in the summer of 2000 we were headed back to Portland, OR so that she could start her program.