Have you ever played possum when it’s time to do IT because somebody’s too rough when they touch you? Or you know it’ll only last 29 seconds? Or, or…you only want oral sex and she wants the whole shabangum? Or, or, or…there’s not any foreplay (dinner, movie, desserts, wine, cuddling) and he just wants to dive right in?

 Several years ago, I lay in bed listening to the sound of my husband taking a shower. As soon as the water was off, there went the banging and clanging underneath the sink. And the opening and closing of doors. The toilet flushed again.

I rolled onto my belly.

The light from the bathroom evaded the sea of shadows in our room. From the tiny slits of my eyes, it was clear that he was wrapped in a towel.

I grew still, eyes nailed shut.

He neared my side of the bed.  A cold, wet hand surfaced midthigh.

I knew what was coming next. A gentle voice said, “hey, you sleep?”

I didn’t respond. I thought, “my lifeless body should speak for itself. No one’s home.”

Is it just me or does any of this sound familiar? 

That was me. The possum. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the reasons I didn’t like sex. Or didn’t want sex. Or believed that sex felt like another thing on my to-do list.

He also didn’t know what Mama Nellie, my grandma, told me when I was a fourteen year old girl. I’d gotten cornered into a birds-and-the-bees convo one evening after school. She said, “Don’t be in a rush to get married. All a man wants to do is make you do what he wants you to do and have sex.”

That was me, still rejecting sex as a married woman.

And that was him, getting rejected again.

And that was part of the breakdown of our marriage.