Naughty Mommy

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Contrast.

I need to fine-tune my antenna reception.  All week, I’ve had the  impression that I should keep my Saturday night open. No idea why, just that I should.

That meant turning down other plans, three times, so I could hang out at the house instead to see what was up and why I so desperately had to be home instead of at a movie or at a friend’s or at a get-together.

It better be good, I’d told myself.

Imagine my surprise when my ex’s car pulled up and my younger  daughter walked in unexpectedly in the late afternoon when she was supposed to be with her dad all weekend.  No  notice,  no  phone  call,  no  warning—just showing up for three or four hours because she didn’t want to go to the mall with him. Something about teen girls not being cool shopping with their dads in tow.

Not that I don’t enjoy having her around, but I just didn’t expect her. All I could think was, what if I’d been sitting on the  living room sofa with someone, sharing a couple of glasses of wine and  maybe more? She didn’t even know I was home. What if I’d finally let a man cross the  threshold  to  my  bedroom?   If  I  were  a  naughty mommy, what might she have walked in on? For Pete’s sake, I have chandeliers.

Maybe that’s the reason I had to keep tonight open. So I can have a little talk with my kids about their unexpected appearances and the assumption that I’ll always be home when they need/want me.

But I took my youngling to dinner, played with the newly-groomed puppy, and chauffeured them back to her dad’s (twice, because she forgot her keys). By then, it was well  after  8  PM  and  too  late  to  do  anything  else  I’d wanted to do, so I decided to frolic around the house and do a few chores I hadn’t finished earlier.

Something’s wrong with this picture,  I decided.  I’m cleaning house on a Saturday night. Yes, I dumped almost the entire contents of two closets, but still….

Maybe I’ve just been too wholesome, I thought.

So I renamed my master bedroom the “mistress bedroom” as there are no “masters” here. I stopped to smell the bright orangey-pink roses on my countertop. I put on lingerie.

Yeah. I  cleaned  closets  in  my  sexiest  lingerie—felt pretty damned  good about it, too! Okay, so it’s not exactly vacuuming in the nude, but then, that’s a man’s job, right?

In the early days of my first marriage (positive thinking that I might do it again someday), I wore slinky, satiny  lingerie  most  evenings  around  the  house.  Not  for him—he was usually working overtime back then and not home. For me. Because I liked it and felt sexy and happy in it.

So I’m reinstituting the lingerie policy. Right now.

It’s the  least  a  wholesome  mommy  can  do  to  be naughty when she’s alone.