Second Chance

Second Chance -- Part 1

Coming from behind

This is the first part of a three part story. The first two parts have the title: Second Chance (Parts 1 and 2). The third part has the title: The Rest of the Story. The reason for the change in title will become obvious when the reader begins to read it. All parts have been written and proofed. I intend to submit them on consecutive days, proofing them one more time. I do not wish to keep the reader waiting for the next installment.

Any depiction of sexual intercourse involves only people who are 18 years of age or older.

Hi! My name is Amy. This story is about the metamorphosis of a marriage -- my marriage. We'll start only months before the ceremony that recorded that marriage in the county clerks office. I was a senior in high school, eighteen years old. I was not a cheer leader, not the most popular girl in the class. But I was interested in boys as were most of the girls in high school.

I tried to dress attractively -- sticking closely to the root meaning of that word. I wanted to attract some attention to myself, especially from the more attractive boys in the class. It was not as easy as it sounds. If my skirts were too short or too tight, or I used a little too much makeup, or I showed off my boobs too much I would have moved out of the realm of being attractive and into the category of being a slut. I did not want to go that far. It was a hard game to play and I had to be very aware especially of what the other girls were thinking and saying. It was the girls in our class that set and enforced the norms.

There were those girls that did not appear to even try to be attractive. I didn't understand some of them. There were a few whose genes were not very kind to them. Their face or their body or both were just plain unattractive. I'd use the four letter "U" word but that seems to be cruel to use on a girl who was born with two strikes against her. There were other girls whose parents dictated what they would wear and were obviously afraid of letting their little girl look attractive. There were others who seemed to already be losing a battle against food addiction. And there were still others who just didn't seem to have the knack of choosing an outfit that looked good and well coordinated.

You might be thinking, "What about the poor kids who couldn't afford decent or stylish clothes?" It was my experience that poor kids may have had a more difficult time of it, but I knew a few girls who got their clothes from a clothing bank, but were able to pick out things that actually looked quite attractive on them. I had to give them a lot of credit. They seemed to have the skill to make lemonade out of lemons -- at least when it came to dressing themselves and looking good.

I was never in the upper tier of girls -- the cheerleaders augmented by a few rich b . ., (be nice Amy) girls who could afford the best clothing, hair care, manicuring, and even cars. I could not have kept up with that group, and didn't try. They went after the first string jocks and the guys who drove the best cars.

I was second tier. It was important to me and the other girls in my second tier that we attract and keep a good quality boyfriend. Most of us had been dating since our freshman year, and figured our senior year was a time to get serious. Those girls who had their sights set on going a distance away to go to college may have opted out of getting serious, but even some of them held to the delusion that they would go to college and their boyfriend would be waiting for them and they would have waited for their boyfriend.

I was thinking about going into teaching. I wasn't really dedicated teacher material -- like it was the only thing I had ever wanted to do since kindergarten. It just seemed like it might not be a bad job compared to a lot of others. I would get my degree at a local college and live at home. I wasn't made of money and neither were my parents. I didn't want to graduate from college with a whopping big debt. My parents and I got along reasonably well. We could live together for four more years.

The guy I was attracted to was Al -- Alan. He was second tier, too. He ran cross-country in the fall, and played basketball in the winter, but usually sat on the bench unless the first string had built up a whopping big lead or a bunch of guys had fouled out. We sort of hooked up in the fall of senior year when I went out for the girls' cross country team. We were in a couple of the same classes although I was all college prep where he was taking some vocational courses.

Christmas vacation we spent a lot of time together -- a lot. After that we were pretty hot and heavy. We were considered to be a couple. I know it was not premeditated, but in February, after a party (no drinking) following a basketball game on a Friday night, Alan was taking me home. He stopped at his house and invited me in. "You've never seen my room," he said. "It's cool. I have it decorated so that I can shut of the lights to my room but turn on a black light and you see stars on the ceiling and walls."

I thought his parents would be home. He did, too. We entered through the back door into the kitchen and there was a note on the table for him saying that his parents had gone to the home of friends and thought they would be back around midnight.

We went up to his room and looked at it with the lights on. Then he had me get on his bed and lay back so that I would get the full effect. He turned on the black light and extinguished the room lights and there on his ceiling was the night sky filled with stars. It even had some familiar constellations on it -- the dippers, Orion and a couple more I can't remember the names of (one of them looks like a W). He got on the bed with me to look at the stars.

The party that we went to was boring and we had left early. It wasn't even close to midnight when we got on the bed. We started making out under the stars. Two weeks later I was late with my period. Seven weeks later, still no period. I got a test from the drug store. I was pregnant. Shit. One night. One mistake.

I wasn't going to get an abortion. That's not me. It wasn't Al either. We bit the bullet and told our parents. Al and I were together when we told them. We told my parents first, then Al's parents. Actually we took them out to eat and told them in the restaurant in the hopes that they would not make a big scene in front of the people in the restaurant.

All I will say is that our parents were far more reasonable than either one of us expected. Two weekends after our announcement Al's Dad, my Dad and Al began building a small apartment in a corner of my parents' walk-in basement. I would help with the painting. We remained in school living with our parents so that we graduated with our class. Then we got married in a small private ceremony. We took up residence in the basement apartment once we were married.

Al had been working part time in a fast food restaurant and hoped over the summer to get more hours, which he did. I started working there too. My parents let us live rent free in that apartment. We tried very hard not to interfere with their life.

In the fall Al continued working at the fast food place but modified his hours so that he could go to the local technical school and take up refrigeration. It was a year long program.

I worked fast food until the first of November. I was young, I worked back where they prepared the food and did more walking and less standing than I would have done had I worked a cash register. The baby was not too big. The size of the baby and my constant movement kept me from having too much trouble with my feet and legs swelling. And I hardly ever worked a full eight hour shift.

The baby was born before Thanksgiving. As soon as we found out that it was probably going to be a girl, we started calling her Amy Junior. But when it came time to put a name on the birth certificate, we named her Doris. Dory and I spent a lot of time that winter in that small basement apartment as I nurtured her and bonded with her.

Al kept working as many hours as he could and continued to work hard at school.

It was a little after Easter on a Friday night that something went wrong with the freezer at the fast food place. They called in the manager, who called the company that serviced their equipment. The manager was told that the service company was swamped. They should keep the freezer shut tight as much as possible and he would try to get a service technician there, but it would be Sunday at the earliest.

Al came in to work on Saturday morning and heard about the problem. The manager was there. He was phoning around trying to get some dry ice. Al asked whether he could look at the freezer, explaining that he was taking refrigeration classes at the vocational center. The manager gave him the go ahead. Al came home and got some tools. He went back and thought maybe he could get it up and running again temporarily but would have to go to an auto parts store for parts. To make a long story short, he got the freezer working again.

When the service man came to service the freezer and saw the repair that had been made, he reported it to his boss. The boss then called the manager of the fast food restaurant, trying to make contact with Al. When Al showed up for work the next day, the head of the service company was there, and told him that when he graduated from tech school he should give him a call and there would be a job waiting for him. He gave Al his business card. He told both Al and the restaurant manager that he was impressed with Al's work and ingenuity.

I spent a lot of time boxed up in that little apartment all winter long. I'm not complaining. We had a roof over our head, food to eat, a warm place to live -- but no window that I could look through to see what it was like outdoors. Saturday was always a big day for me. We had no car. Al took public transportation to school and could walk to work. The deal with my parents was that they would let me use Mom's car on Saturday morning to buy my groceries if Mom would give me her list and some money and I would buy her groceries, too. Sometimes she would sweeten the pot by offering to babysit Dory as well.

It was a few hours of liberation for me. By the time summer rolled around, I was thinking about trying to find a job. What with college students coming home for the summer and high school students just entering the job market, my search for a job was not going well. In August I ran into the mom of a high school classmate of mine while I was shopping. Suddenly it dawned on me. This mom does child care. I approached her and introduced myself. She remembered me. I told her I was looking for a job, but if I got one, I would need child care, so I asked about the ages of the children she took and what she charged.

She took children from age six months until they were three years old. Her rates were such that even if I went back to fast food, I could pay her and still have some money I could contribute to the household. She would be having two openings in September.

After much searching, I was given an opportunity to start out as a teller at a Savings and Loan in September. Al was already working for the commercial refrigerator servicing company and now I had a job. We asked my parents if we could continue living in the apartment while we paid for our used car and then saved up for a down payment to buy a house. We offered to pay them some rent, but they refused and said that they were happy with us staying there because we had a worth-while goal and were working to attain it.

About two years later we put a down payment on a fixer-upper in a good neighborhood. It took us a month to get enough fixed up so that we could move in, and after that it was well over a year before we had the home in good condition.

A couple years later we sold that house for twice the amount we paid for it and bought another fixer- upper. We have done that four times so far. Between Al's job, my job, flipping houses and living within our means, we are not rich, but we are comfortable.

But our marriage was not comfortable. It started being uncomfortable on that first night in February. We didn't know what we were doing. Yes, Al obviously ejaculated. I had an orgasm (I wasn't sure what it was at the time, but I knew it was significant). My hymen had been broken by the handle of a hairbrush years before, so that was not a problem, and we had enough foreplay to make me sopping wet, so it was not painful for me. But it was over in a fairly short amount of time and instead of basking in the afterglow we were immediately terrified that Al's parents could come home at any moment and we would be caught. So it left us unsatisfied.

We really didn't mean to go that far and the fact that we did filled us with guilt and a resolve that we would not do it again. But over the days and weeks to follow that resolve was tested by the fact that we had already done it once. An invisible barrier had been crossed. The temptation to cross it again became much stronger.

With Al's being on the basketball team, working and going to school, we did not have time or opportunity to repeat the accident before we found out we were pregnant and had told our parents. After that, although they did not say anything, we felt that they were scrutinizing our every move. So we did not have intercourse again until we were married.

But then it was in an apartment IN MY PARENTS' HOUSE. That had an affect on me. The apartment was right under my parents' living room. Thoughts would go through my head, "Were they still up? Could they hear us?" Those thoughts kept me from opening myself up completely to having enjoyable and uninhibited sex with my husband.

At the same time I had this crazy notion that sex should be entirely spontaneous without any planning ahead or preparation. The idea that there might be books or videos out there that might be helpful to us in learning how to pleasure one another was somehow repulsive to me. Birds do it without reading books. Bees do it without watching videos. Dogs and cats do it without something or someone showing them how. People should not need instruction. That was my mind set.

And sex was dirty -- physically dirty -- for both sexes -- occurring in the same general area of the body from which one urinates and defecates. And it was morally dirty, too. My parents never talked about it. Sex shops and XXX bookstores were limited to certain neighborhoods and had the reputation of catering to people of low moral character. And while there was plenty of talk about sex in high school, that talk was often in whispers or modified whispers and was limited to when people were in a group where everyone felt the topic of conversation would be kept hidden and their conversation would not be monitored or overheard.

When we did start having sex, once we were married, we were somewhat afraid of it. I was now three and a half months along. Al did not want to hurt me or the baby, and I did not know just how careful we had to be, either. As the months progressed I became bigger and more uncomfortable which just made it more difficult for us to engage in any type of uninhibited lovemaking.

After Dory was born, she slept in the same room in which we slept. That was quite inhibiting, too, for more than just the, "Don't wake the baby," factor. I didn't want my baby daughter to be aware of us doing the nasty.

In addition (and I don't know whether every woman feels the same about this) pregnancy and childbirth was traumatic for me. The discomfort in the last months before giving birth, the pain of labor and delivery and the fact that I didn't just bounce back from it in a couple of days stuck with me and lessened my desire to have sex. It made me afraid of getting pregnant again.

And then there was the image of the mom. I've read that I am not uncommon in feeling this way. As I grew up observing my mom, I was left with the impression that moms and dads are not sexual people. It's like I preferred to think of myself as having been born of a virgin rather than think that my parents conceived me through the act of sexual intercourse.

As I look back, my years in high school may have been fueled by hormones, but that hormonal influence was greatly increased and influenced by the girls around me and the culture around me which exerted a great deal of pressure to dress in ways that were considered to be attractive and to feel the need to have a boyfriend. If I did not have what it takes to attract an acceptable boyfriend, the message was that there was something seriously wrong with me. To this day I do not know where the hormonal pressure dropped off and the peer pressure took over.

And then, of course, pregnancy does a huge number on a girl's hormones and I do not know to what extent the modification of my hormonal balance that came about because of my pregnancy and delivery changed my desire for having a sexual relationship with my husband.

But the bottom line is that once we got pregnant, our sexual desires changed as well. Once we were married and until the baby was born we were both very cautious. Because we got pregnant before marriage we felt guilt and shame in connection with sex. But after Dory was born and the obstetrician gave us the all clear, Al was eager to begin an enthusiastic sexual relationship, ". . . on the right foot," as he put it. I was much more hesitant.

The obstetrician gave me a DVD of exercises to do to get back in shape. "Pregnancy can do a real number on a woman's body," she said, "but it doesn't have to. Do these exercises and eat right and you will feel yourself getting stronger as well as getting your shape back." I did the exercises and I got my shape back, but I kept on wearing the baggy clothing.

The differences in our attitude towards sex became a great source of contention in our marriage. It seems like he was always wanting to do something sexual with me and would try to initiate some kind of sexual activity almost daily. I never initiated anything sexual, and let it be known that his advances toward me were not wanted.

To his credit, Al was sensitive to this. His reaction to this was that he must be doing something wrong. He therefore, on his own, started buying books on marriage and what a man can do to make a sexual relationship more satisfying for the woman. In the process he loaded himself up with a lot of guilt, figuring that it was all his fault that I didn't seem to like to have sex with him. The fact that no matter how hard he tried, he was not able to have sex with me that gave me pleasure diminished his self-confidence.

In his reading and watching videos he learned some things he could do to bring more pleasure to me. He really wanted to make sure that I had one or more orgasms before he would come. If he did bring me to orgasm it was largely a physical reaction to his stimulation. I was trying hard not to enjoy it. Sometimes he really got to me and I would have a full blown, ". . . fucked senseless," orgasm where I would have pretty much lost total control.

After those times I would be upset at him for the next day or days to come because I felt he had breached my defenses and caused me to enjoy the experience in spite of the fact that I was trying so hard to be a good wife and mother who is not supposed to enjoy sex.

Eventually, I forced him to go to counseling by threatening divorce. The first couple of counselors disappointed me because they thought that our problem was in communication. I wanted them to identify the problem as being that Al wanted way too much sex.