My mother was cooking and my father came up behind her, put his arms around her and grabbed a boob. I immediately felt awkward, like I shouldn’t be seeing that. Granted, that’s not a healthy attitude about sexuality either, but what I felt was what a lot of kids feel. Kids don’t want to have to deal with their parents’ sex lives; in fact, most of us firmly believe that our parents pretty much gave that stuff up when the last sibling was born. And, they never really enjoyed it.
Parents having sex? Eww.
But when you get divorced and you’re not ready to give up that part of your life — and believe me, there are some who are, happily — then you have to figure out how to be a sexual being without dragging your kids into it.
It isn’t easy, but it also isn’t rocket science.
And that’s my biggest complaint (although I have others, many already expressed by Meredith O’Brien) with “Cougar Town,” the new Courteney Cox show in which she plays a recently divorced 40-something who, according to ABC, “explores the honest truths about dating and aging in a beauty and youth obsessed culture.”
Honest truths? Hmm, well, yes and no. The show makes me cringe for many reasons, and not just because of the whole “cougar” phenomenon. Do I know middle-aged women (single or not) who obsess over their sags and wrinkles? Yes. Do I know middle-aged women who are bitter about men and complain about dating, or just don’t know how to do it with confidence in today’s hookup world? Sure. Do I know middle-aged women who date younger men, whether they embrace the cougar label or not? Absolutely. I’m one of them. I don’t embrace the title, but I’m seeing a (slightly) younger man. Not because I made it a goal; it just happened, and I’m OK with it and so is he.
No, my real problem with Cox’s Jules Cobb is that she keeps rubbing her sexuality in her clearly distressed 17-year-old son’s face. As a sexually active divorced mother who keeps her hanky-panky as private as I can, I want to grab Cobb, look her in the face and scream, “No Botox for you if you keep this up!”
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Vicki Larson contributes to Around the Watercooler at Mommy Tracked. She is a journalist and single mom who also writes at The OMG Chronicles.
