if my memory serves, I think this was a scene right out of "story of o" explaining why o could never masturbate properly.

really, you don't have to keep beating yourself up over this. change the scenario in your head to make it part of your fantasy melee. it's not a client, a friend, another MOM that walks in and catches you. it's someone that you wouldn't mind having sex with. presto chango.

maybe you need to deal with your sense of shame and embarassment by masturbating to a fantasy that you live in a puritan village in 1600 and after a very public, humiliating trial by the village elders, you are forced to wear a scarlett "M" on your overcoat so that all may know your private shame. oh, let your imagination run wild with this one...

i guess my point is, it doesn't matter that you are living the vanilla life in a small conservative town. most people living the vanilla life have very active sexual imaginations. and that is why erotica is so very popular.

you are still human, as is the woman who walked in on you.

she may be even more mortified than you for a whole host of internal reasons that would make a sailor blush, right?

well, my guess is that she won't be barging in on you again any time soon. think of the positives.

if she gossips and the gossip gets back to you, act horrified and deny deny deny. call the woman a pervert for making up such ridiculous lies.

or shrug and laugh it off.

I have been on both sides of this-- in my mid-twenties, when I was single and all my close girlfriends were getting hitched and dropping out of the bar/club scene, I was the last to catch on to the changes taking place. I enjoyed doing the one-on-one nature stuff, hikes, camping, lunch dates-- but it took me awhile to realize these friends were pulling out of the nightlife scene.

The problem is, when you are "completely single" time spent one-on-one with a married or significanted girlfriend FEELS like time awastin' that you should be out finding "the one."

The reason it feels like that is because the married/significanted chicks talk non-stop about their relationship life and implicitly judge the completely single girl for being on the loose. I was dating, but my girlfriends didn't want to hear about any dates that didn't have the potential of a diamond engagement ring at the end, and they didn't want me to waste time on any man who wasn't marriage-minded. It didn't matter that I wasn't yet marriage-minded myself.

So I had to find some fun-time women to have fun being single with, and I did.

Then when I met "the one" these fun-time women all disappeared from my life. I wanted to go out for coffee and nature hikes and wake up early for yoga-- they wanted to go out trawling for men and sleep off the hangover in the morning. I tried to maintain the friendships because I genuinely liked the women, but these were friendships of circumstance and convenience, as it turned out. They weren't interested in being friends with married couples doing the fifth wheel thing.

They didn't want to hear about my doings with my boyfriend-- one girlfriend went so far as to insult him regularly until I just dropped her from my life.

Luckily-- those tried and true high school friends who had married in their early twenties were and are still my good friends, because I put up with all their smug marriedness in my single days and adjusted to the lunches, the craft nights, the trips to the playground with their kids.

And now they are a great source of advice and hand-me-down toddler clothes, to boot.

Tend to be needy friends.

Just sayin'.