Summer 2017
Our parents, despite their Boomer quirks, are great babysitters, if you overlook the cost of guilt. They’ve always been gracious about taking the kids for a few hours so that Jack and I could go to dinner or shopping together. Once the babies slept through the night, they started hosting overnights, too.
Jack’s parents have always had more money than they needed, and their loose spending habits often worked to our advantage. They’d buy a house up north or down south for a few years, and let us crash there for family vacations. They owned a yacht at one point and burned through several RVs at other points. During the summer of 2017, they bought a little speed boat that they kept on a big inland lake in northern Michigan, which they invited us to use as often as we’d like.
We decided to take advantage of this setup before they changed their minds and moved onto the next thing. It was relatively close to home; we could leave for a quick weekend getaway — just me and Jack, now that I wasn’t tethered via nipple to Eloise. My parents offered to watch all four kids for two nights, and so off we went.
We had big plans for that short weekend. We were going to rent a hotel room in Petoskey. It’s a lovely town on Lake Michigan that we’d frequented often in our college years, when Jack’s parents owned a million-dollar “cottage” in the neighboring, more affluent summertime town. We were going to drive to the boat slip on the inland lake every day, and just chill. Drink a little, eat some rice cakes and sandwiches, enjoy the sun and the quiet. And also, we were going to get me high for the first time in my life.
Growing up, smoking pot wasn’t something that was done in my social circles. The stigma around weed raged strong in my community for years, and it wasn’t an option when I was pregnant or breastfeeding anyways. Jack and I felt satisfied with some wine on occasion, and we eschewed cannabis when offered, deciding that we’d abstain so that we could one day righteously tell our kids that we never did drugs. It was considered a drug, so Just Say No, right? That was obviously before what some may call my “midlife crisis.”
Jack used it first, the summer before this one. He was away on his Man Trip, a weekend with his high school friends that he’s gone on every summer since freshman year of college. He came back pumped to tell me what a life altering experience his first time smoking pot had been. He loved the feeling, and he immediately realized that it made him introspective in the best possible way.
Jack knew that I would love it, too, someday. I specifically remember him telling me that I would find sex while high absolutely incredible.
I was intrigued.
My sister — and whoever she was dating at the time — was the one person that I knew who’d always smoked pot. Though she often sang its praises to me, we’d never gotten high together; our partying days hadn’t aligned, with her being four years younger and me perpetually pregnant.
Now married to a self-proclaimed pothead, Molly had all the goods. I called her up and told her my plans, and she became my first dealer, promptly delivering me a bag of weed, a one-hitter, and coaching on what to do and what to expect.
When our weekend away came around, we decided to waste no time and drove straight to the boat. Jack was eager to get high, too, having abstained out of husbandly duty for the year since his last Man Trip.
Once we were parked, floating in the middle of the giant lake, we fucked quickly in the back of the boat where we were out of anyone’s sight, our adrenaline for the weekend ahead boiling in our veins and our loins. You know how I get on vacation.
With that business through, Jack lit up the little pipe and inhaled. I’d only smoked a cigarette once, while drunk at a party in high school. I lit up like he had, shooing away his instructions, and inhaled.
Or, at least, I thought I had inhaled. We waited five minutes to see if we’d done it properly. Jack was grinning and unusually quiet. “Feels good, right?” he gushed, bobbing his head along to music that splayed from the boat’s speakers.
“I don’t feel any different,” I admitted.
I tried again, this time with Jack watching me intently. “Like this,” he said, and demonstrated how to take a perfect toke, lighting the end of the little pipe and inhaling deeply, then exhaling a long plume.
I tried to imitate his actions, but nothing happened except that I burned my throat. By the end of that day on the boat, my throat was raw and my voice raspy from repeated attempts to reach reefer madness, but I remained sober. Sometimes I would cough, and Jack would get excited, breaking into cheerleader mode, “There you go!” Other times I would blow out a giant white cloud of plume, and Jack would again cajole me, “You got it this time. For sure.” And still, I didn’t.
I was disappointed with myself as we headed back to the hotel after boating, but not so disappointed that I didn’t enjoy a few glasses of wine and several more tries off the one-hitter. The wine and the weed mixed together — was I high, or just buzzed from the alcohol, or some combination of both? We decided not to overthink it and instead had the kind of fantastic sex that only two parents with an entire kid-free night and the-entire-next-day can have.
We were out on the boat again before noon the next day, eager to enjoy our Subway sandwiches under the sun. I ate up, and then Jack brought us to the far end of the lake. There, we followed the winding Crooked River through weeds and trees, eventually parking in a small, private nook to start the pot process again.
I’m not always great at taking instruction from Jack. Sure, I’m pleasant and polite, even eager, when learning anything from anyone else in the world. Is it my stubbornness that constantly gets in the way of my ability to give Jack the same respect that I give everyone else? But I was desperate here. I had failed repeatedly yesterday and I was determined to succeed today. I watched Jack carefully as he demonstrated, then we reloaded the one-hitter and it was my turn.
Jack gave the instructions yet again. “Okay, put your mouth on it and light, and while you’re lighting, breathe in a huge deep breath like you’re breathing in for your doctor. You need to take it down to your lungs…I think you’re only taking it as far as your throat.”
I did what he said, closing my eyes and imagining myself doing my best inhale for a doctor with a stethoscope. “Hold it in, push it down, keep breathing in,” Jack coached. I did as I was told. Then I coughed, hard, and blew all the smoke out of my mouth.
Jack nodded. “I’ll be damned if you didn’t get it that time. Let’s go back to the lake.” He offered up my favorite boating activity. “Do you want to drive around really fast?”
My jovial husband loves to tell the rest of the story like this, “About ten minutes later, I’m speeding around the lake, and I look back. There’s Lizzie, sitting in the middle of the bench in her black bikini, her arms extended, resting on the seat backs, her head tossed back and her hair flying behind her. She’s smiling huge with her mouth a little open and her head bobbing all around to the music I’m blasting.” Yup, I had finally got my hit.
We spent the entire day on the water, driving fast around the lake and then putting through the little rivers and canals that link this lake up to others. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d felt so relaxed and yet so alert. I was in the moment.
I was noticing every detail of every house, and yet not with envy or idea-gathering for my own home — I was just appreciating, just looking. I looked at my guy, giggled with him, focused on him. This was a new feeling, and it was good.
We sobered up and went back to the hotel. Have you ever had sex while high? That in-the-moment feeling that I had felt on the boat was nothing compared to this.
My mind easily switched into the game. I left behind my disciplined daytime persona. I wasn’t stubborn, or ruminating, or uptight, or planning anything. I was here, with this man.
How many years had I just “endured” sex? What a waste. What had I been trying to prove? What had kept me from enjoying the moment as it unfolded in front of me?
The weed put a filter over me. I let go of all that didn’t serve me, and like a horse with blinders on, I focused on what was happening now. I did more than accept my situation. I embraced it.
In Jack’s eyes, I saw his eagerness to please me, and in turn please himself. I watched him caress my skin, and I felt myself rejoicing in its smooth olive tone. When his hands grasped my hips, I admired his strength first. His firm hold, his muscular arms, his intentional agenda to make love to me in any way possible. Then I admired my hips, the widest part of my body, the only voluptuous portion of me, my most womanly feature. I climbed on top of Jack, and I felt deep love for those hips, for the work they were doing to send these waves of pleasure through all of me.
And when I couldn’t keep my eyes open for the visual stimulation anymore, I closed them, and still, I felt everything. I felt every sensation, every emotion. I felt bold and empowered and erotic. My orgasms that night were stellar, sending me to another universe, reminding me of those first orgasms I experienced at Jack’s hands in his GMC Jimmy half my lifetime ago. I felt the love between us, and it set me soaring. I felt reborn.
Later, as my high started to wear off, I queried Jack, “Am I going to be hungover? How am I going to sleep like this?”
Jack chuckled and kissed my forehead. “You’re going to sleep like a princess.”