Oh baby! Oh, baby…

Sex after kids fraught with peril

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‘You can see why the mood isn’t exactly set for a hot sexual encounter, when the couple crawls exhausted and exasperated into bed after barely seeing each other or talking all day,” says Janet Adler (not her real name), mother to one toddler and some seven months pregnant with the next, thus proving—as Britney Spears, Heidi Klum, and many other less illustrious women have before her—that sex after babies is possible.

After all, she says, the parents of a new born have been “spending the whole day caring for a crying baby—or, in my partner’s case, working at his office all day on no sleep and coming home to a crying baby and a bitching, frantic girlfriend.”

Welcome to the world of sex amidst young children. With the inordinate amount of attention paid to actions leading to the making of babies, the childless must sometimes wonder about the gaping abyss in popular discourse surrounding sex after having babies.

As Adler’s remarks indicate, however, this lacuna is not just because the intense physical, psychological and social assaults on a new mother (and her partner) are too complicated for our tits-and-ass culture. It’s because there isn’t always much lovin’ going on after these assaults.

Medical experts decree that one should wait six weeks post-partum to resume “marital relations.” But if you didn’t tear, didn’t have an episiotomy, and didn’t have a caesarean, then your midwife or doctor may give the green light substantially earlier.
This, of course, makes getting back into the sack as soon as possible seem desirable, even necessary, if yours is a “normal” and “healthy” relationship, but the reality may be quite different. Lana Gilday, doula, RN and mother, concurs.
“Please don’t beat yourselves up if you feel it’s taking ‘too long’ to get back into the swing of things,” she says. “Remember everything your body’s been through and is still going through. If you are breastfeeding, the hormones are still raging.”

Given that a women’s body is not ready to sustain another pregnancy immediately after giving birth, it’s not surprising that many women find they need some sexual down-time once the kiddo has squeezed out of their vagina. The hormones behind breastfeeding also have the nifty side effect of nullifying many women’s sex drives.

As anyone will tell you, however, a sex drive has a substantial psychological component. Both the birthing woman and her spouse may need some time to recover psychologically from the birth experience itself. Yes, we’re talking about what happened to the girly bits.

The graphic detail today’s supporting spouses are expected to witness means plenty of opportunity for unfortunate images to be etched permanently into grey matter. Imagine the attentive partner watching with anticipation the last two pushes: something resembling a little alien head debuts from the lady’s posterior region, and then just stays there for the eternity until the next contraction pushes the baby out. Maybe it makes a suitably alien angry face at supportive spouse. Regardless, only time can allow the vagina to be considered as a sexual organ again.
Ditto for the lady whose lady bits were so contorted.

“I felt for months that there was something wrong with my vagina / vulva, that it had been misshapen or ‘broken’ by the birth of the baby,” says Adler about the delay that she and her partner had in resuming ‘normal’ sexual relations. Despite assurances from her midwife that everything was, indeed, normal, she needed time to adjust. In the end, she concludes: “Do your Kegels and don’t freak out about [your vagina]!”

That said, it’s not always psychological. Gilday points out that, “If sex is painful six months postpartum, please tell your health professional, as there are several treatable conditions that may cause vaginal discomfort.” Two of Gilday’s close friends had this happen to them, six and 12 months postpartum, respectively. So it’s more common than you may think.

Then, of course, there is the fact that society stamps a stereotype on new mothers.
“A modern woman’s identity takes a major battering when she finds herself at home alone with a baby all day, overwhelmed by all the feeding, cleaning, organisation and etcetera that comes along with the job description,” Adler says. “It’s easy to feel like a housewife rather than the woman your partner fell in love with. And the feeling of being shuffled into the subordinate position in society is not much of a turn on.”

Meanwhile, fathers oftentimes find themselves caught between the expectation that they contribute equally (or near-equally) to the disastrous household and the fact that their fathers probably didn’t.
Overcoming this disparity in social roles, according to Adler, takes more than a dozen roses.

“Guys: forget about dramatic displays like serenading her from the parking lot of the apartment building,” she advises. “The best demonstration of affection for the mother of your new child is to HELP HER OUT!
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“Post-baby courtship might just be you doing the laundry while she gets a nap in,” she adds. “You’d be surprised by how much more she loves you when she wakes up.”
And you know what can happen when you’re feeling lovely… V

Oh baby! Oh, baby…

Sex after kids fraught with peril

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