lol i have unLOCKED SEO with this post already, just gonna watch the pageviews roll in
No, let’s be serious, though! I have a lot of opinions on having sex after you have a baby, and now you get to hear them. Let us begin with a brief litany of disclaimers:
1. I don’t know your life.
2. There are a billion emotional and psychological aspects to having sex after giving birth which this post is not designed to address. If you don’t want to have sex, don’t! If you’re all touched out and the last thing you want is to have sex, own that shit! You just had a fuckin’ BABY.
3. Wait the six weeks that they tell you to wait. Did I wait for six weeks? No. Is it a good idea? Yes. Let your medical provider feel around up there and then give you the green light.
4. If your partner is pressuring you and you’re not feeling it, smother them with a pillow in their sleep. Call me, I’ll tell the cops we spent all evening together playing Jenga.
5. Mom, Dad, aunts, my one niece who reads The Toast…close the tab, please.
6. This is for people who had babies come out of holes in their junk and now want to put dicks or dick-like objects in said holes. There are many other ways to have babies, and many other ways to have sex.
Okay. Let’s do this.
Let me first outline a common mistake people make in this situation: they have sex at six weeks (when most people get cleared by their care provider to go for it), or earlier (for shame, you hussies!), and it sucks and feels super weird, so they wait another week and try again. It makes perfect sense.
This is the thing, though: it’s not the amount of time you wait, it’s the number of times you do it.
Time doesn’t make having sex post-baby much better. That initial six weeks does, don’t get me wrong. You want to heal up, and you want a medical professional to clear you. But after that, it’s mostly having sex that will make it easier to have sex. I think the magic number is nine times. Once you’ve had sex nine times, it’ll start to feel more like sex, and less like that thing where you get a cavity filled and then you close your mouth and your teeth don’t fit together right, and it feels weird and unnatural for a while.
So, if you have sex once, and it sucks, and you wait another two weeks, and it sucks again, and so you wait another two weeks, and it still sucks, you might wind up having a whole YEAR before sex is fun again.
My recommendation, then, with all the caveats outlined above, and if it feels right FOR YOU, is to try to knock out those first crummy times ASAP. Have crummy sex until it gets good (crummy, but not OH SHIT, bail out immediately if you feel WRONG, you are not a panda on whom the future of your species relies.) Something that also gets overlooked in terrible, one-size-fits-all advice for new moms in this situation: if you’ve ever experienced sexual assault, you may have a VERY different reaction to this than someone who hasn’t! Take extra good care of yourself.
(The reason I basically never write things about kids is that I stuff everything so full of disclaimers that it becomes pointless, but I really cringe when I read things for moms that AREN’T full of disclaimers, so there you are.)
BUT, if you want to go for it, and you feel ready, and you’ve been cleared, and you’re not an addict, and you like slow-moving spy movies, and you’ve been nodding along so far: drink two large glasses of wine first, lube yourself to the gills, listen to your preferred sex music or put Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) on in the background, say “Nicole said this would get better,” and you may just find that it takes care of itself pretty quickly.
I can tell you’re already feeling it.
When I had my first kid, I was feeling full of lust and enthusiasm and earth-mother-ness and tried to have sex two weeks after. IT DID NOT GO GREAT, TO BE HONEST. I had three stitches in there, and I wound up rearing back and almost kicking my husband’s teeth out. We stopped. We tried again at five weeks. It wasn’t awesome, but I was happy to be doing it. We did it a bunch more times. It still sucked, but sucked less. That ninth time? That was pretty decent.
When I had my second kid, I waited four weeks. It felt totally normal. I prefer not to draw conclusions about what pushing my children and their FREAKISHLY LARGE HEADS out did to my vagina. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t make resuming sex a lot easier.
The other thing I’ll say on this topic is that having kids does not have to ruin your sex life. I work from home, and so does my husband, so that’s obviously a big help. I would say I have as much sex now as I did before I had small creatures running around trying to impale themselves on the edge of my coffee table.
This is the ultimate YMMV situation. If it’s a priority, you’ll do it, if it’s not, you won’t! Sometimes I pick sex over sleeping. I most definitely pick sex over blow-drying my hair or showering or cleaning the kitchen, and instead of folding my clothes I just dump them in a “clean heap” or a “dirty heap.” My toddler sometimes eats a Clif bar for dinner. That may not be where sex falls on your priority list. That’s just fine! It’s not a moral imperative.
If you’re about to have a kid, and people tell you you’ll never want to have sex again, or that you won’t care about sex after you have kids, ignore them. It’s a weird thing that some parents enjoy doing, telling you that your marriage will go to shit and you’ll never sleep again and sex will repulse you and you’ll never see a movie in the theater until they’re off at college. Some people want to be The Ghost of Parenting Future, and they need a new hobby.
They MIGHT be accidentally right, of course. You, as an individual, might care a bunch less about sex than you used to. But it’s not a guarantee. It’s not set in stone. If you’re a die-hard fuck machine, and you want to keep being a die-hard fuck machine, you can do that. I believe in you.
What I do recommend, if you’re a die-hard fuck machine, is having, like, 5% of you that feels like you and your partner are in an us v. them battle with your kids. Be able to eye-roll over their heads at your sex person. Put them to bed too early that night. Put in a DVD. Do what it takes to stay happy and satisfied. It’s better for them, ultimately, I think, if you’re happy and chill, and anything you can achieve as a new parent to make you feel more like your essential self is priceless. Life is not a network sitcom about doltish useless husbands who want sex, and chilly naggy wives who want to avoid it. Just be yourself, whatever that is, and do exactly what you want. I hope you have a rich and satisfying life, and I love you.
Also, for the love of God, bag that shit UP, bc you’re probably gonna ovulate before you get your period back, and can you imagine?
Tags: babies, dads can give birth toooo, logistics, moms, sex
Flawless.
“Also, for the love of God, bag that shit UP, bc you’re probably gonna ovulate before you get your period back, and can you imagine?’
My grandmother, mother to my father and his 10-months-older brother, would concur.
Ahahahaha, I could say 100% of this and have it be true about my family. Irish twins!
Nothing scared me as much while I was pregnant with my first child as the exhausted woman with a wee baby in an infant carrier coming into my ob gyn pregnant 8 weeks post baby (yes I eavesdropped you know you’d do it too)
I have a friend whose babies are exactly 11 months and 3 weeks apart. So not quite Irish twins but way too close for ANY kind of comfort. When she told me she was pregnant again and her baby was not quite 3 months old, I felt my own empty uterus contract in horror and sympathy.
I thought Irish twins just had to be within a year apart?
In our Irish/Italian Catholic neighborhood, we usually reserved the term Irish twins for when the two kids were born the same calendar year — or when they were in the same grade. Those poor parents.
My oldest two are 13 months apart. From that one time we were too rushed to use a condom. Sigh.
My OB put me on the minipill, with strict instructions to call her when my period returned so she could upgrade me to something stronger. My period never did come back, and our oldest 2 kids were born March 12, 2008 and April 14, 2009. Thanks, doc!
I was on the minipill too! And breastfeeding! And I never got my period back either!
“Also, for the love of God, bag that shit UP, bc you’re probably gonna ovulate before you get your period back, and can you imagine?” Hahaha yes I can #2under2 #oops ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m currently expecting my very first baby and the post-partum sex is already occupying brain real estate.
Other decent resources would include The Longest Shortest Time’s Sex and Parenthood Series, which focuses a lot on how to reframe PIVMO sex and healing if you’ve got a birth-related injury. Plus: Jane Marie is on it!
Good lord having better internet / internet skills back in 1995 would have been of benefit to my sex life after Kid1. (Though, to be fair, so would have been my ditching the Bad OB/GYN and switching sooner to the Magic OB/GYN who barely glanced at my nethers before saying, “oh, honey“)
I’m due with my first in two weeks and so this is so topical for me, Nicole might actually have eavesdropped on my husband and me last night.
May Spacewitch bless and keep Nicole and The Toast always, exactly for pieces like these.
This is 100% true, 9 times is the exact number of times. I would never have put this together without your help. Post-imaginary next future child horny-sad me thanks you.
Truer words were ne’er spoken:
” If it’s a priority, you’ll do it, if it’s not, you won’t!”
I am so glad you guys like these posts, because I sometimes re-read them and I’m just “I think there was advice in here? Maybe? Beneath a sea of IDK, YOU DO YOU, BUT ONLY IF YOU WANNA?” This is why I write less than I used to! I literally don’t think anyone knows anything about other people at ALL anymore.
Dude, I have to say that your posts on working out and on having kids are some of my personal touchstones. All your exhortations of YOU DO YOU and YMMV is super helpful in a world of advice writing that aims to be the One True Whatever. Plus, you’re hilarious, so thanks for bringing the laughs to parenting and fitness, which are not traditional bastions of laughter.
I mean, I feel like “IDK, YOU DO YOU (ps here are some caveats that actually explicitly acknowledge diverse experiences)” is actually a pretty radical position for writing about women’s experiences, and particularly about sex. At least, it feels very refreshing and permission-giving to me. So thank you!
I love your advice, and wish i’d had it when I had babies because I had to figure everything out the hard way. Luckily my Dr was Not American, so she felt “getting back on ze horse” was job 1 after having a baby, “because how else will you feel like yourself again?”
From now on I’m going to privately refer to sex as “ze horse”.
But that is why we love them! So much advice is just so much overgeneralizing bullshit, which you do not do. (Data point: I am asexual and the thought of building a person in my uterus is both terrifying and disgusting to me, and I love your posts on pregnancy, sex, and children.)
Even if the rest of the post were not awesome (which it unequivocally is), it’s amazing for leading up to this:
“…having, like, 5% of you that feels like you and your partner are in an us v. them battle with your kids. Be able to eye-roll over their heads at your sex person. Put them to bed too early that night. Put in a DVD. Do what it takes to stay happy and satisfied.”
Here’s the thing. It’s not the specifics of the advice, b/c advice is shit anyway. It’s the tone. I know from your writing at least some of the cheeky perspective with which you view the world, but that doesn’t automatically translate to this topic. (My caveat is that I’m coming at this from the perspective of totally-not-a-mother-and-not-trying-to-comment-on-that-experience. Talkin’ for m’self here, as that’s all I have the right to do.) You can find precious advice on this topic online, you can find practical or medical advice, you can find sassy writing by mothers only indirectly about motherhood. The trick seems to be finding writing that embraces the multiplicity of experience not just between people, but within yourself.
What I’m saying is keep it coming.
also i hope that seo magic brings in the hits like WHAT. and i selfishly wish you block and then later publish a lot of v. self-righteous or just tone-deaf comments with mercenary glee.
Oh yes please, I cannot wait to see the terrible comments that don’t make it through.
I love these and I love them because there’s something really nice about someone being totally upfront about their experiences while also saying that there’s nothing mandatory about those experiences and it makes me feel all gooey inside.
I don’t go to the gym (gardening is enough exercise for me, kthx), and I’m not a mom, but I love your posts on both of those topics, because they’re so affirming and also filled with irreverence and swears. Because sometimes I find myself in a “hey, I should maybe develop muscle tone in my torso” place, but most of the guides I can find for how to do that are geared towards “get a flat tummy in time for bikini season” or “lose that belly fat in 2 weeks” or other annoying shit like that. Your posts are “here are some things you may be interested in doing! This is my advice for how to get better at doing those things, and also lifting very heavy things.” It’s refreshing.
It’s the encouragement that’s more valuable than advice, sometimes, and your voice as a writer most of all. I felt like applauding throughout this entire piece.
Further note: “This is for people who had babies come out of holes in their junk and now want to put dicks or dick-like objects in said holes. There are many other ways to have babies, and many other ways to have sex.” This is my favorite disclaimer that has ever been.
I’ve been straight up creeping on all your fitness posts. I really like them. I am a bit of a fitness article junkie and I was like the toast and fitness yay! I just wanted to say that so there. Bye.
As someone who doesn’t have kids and never intends to, these posts are just incredibly entertaining and enjoyable to read.
Also “You do you” is really all the advice that anyone needs for all situations, at any time. It’s just plain good sense.
Popping in with a late comment to say I think the disclaimers and “do what you want” alongside personal experiences is actually what makes the article. By saying you don’t have a definite answer you’re saying there doesn’t have to be a definite answer and people should do what works for them and not necessarily follow conventional wisdom, or w/e if it’s not working.
Thanks, Nicole! Reporting from Team C-Section, I’d say 9 times is the charm there too, but would recommend waiting the full 6 weeks for your Badass Abdominal Scar to fully heal first. And then plenty of wine/Advil/your relaxant of choice as an accompaniment.
People who run their mouths about how c-sections are the easier route have never had a major pelvic surgery, been handed a nine pound weight, and told to “stay off their feet” while looking after a new life. You are a champion.
I didn’t count, but nine times does sound about right. As does waiting the full six weeks. As does getting an IUD as soon as humanly possible because I do not want to do this more than the number of times I have already done this.
I got an IUD specifically for having more sex and zero more babies. It took away my sex drive, made me crave sugar ALL the time and made me very grumpy (and I guess not super hot). I’ve just had it taken out… Here’s hoping we can hurry along with the snip.
Did you get a hormonal one or the copper one? I have a non-hormonal Paraguard and its 1000% better than the Mirena I briefly had. The only side effect for me is slightly worse period cramps.
Yeah. I thought it was going to feel normal and was actually super looking forward to sex without a giant basketball around my mid section ruining the experience, and was surprised to find it felt very weird. Not bad though. I definitely waited the full 6 weeks.
Also, if you are breastfeeding, your body may work differently during that time.
(Actual post-coital words after I weaned: “oh thank god I’m not broken.” Not that before it wasn’t good! But it was way more work to get to good.)
The only plus side of having a terminally inadequate milk supply, for me, has been that not making much of a difference. But SO many friends report that they only wanted to do it again after weaning!
Yes, energy drain, possibly conflicted feelings one may have about one’s breasts, AND hormones doing entirely different things: it’s a lot.
Nicole, I had a shit milk supply too and I read and re-read your hairpin post (and all the ensuing awesome comments) about breast feeding to make myself feel better. I also sent it to my sister in law who appreciated it as well. So thanks.
I concur. It didn’t feel ‘normal’ until after baby weaned at 14 mos (so sex was weirdish for me for a long while).
I was amazed how night-and-day it was. If anyone had warned me that might happen, I hadn’t registered it. Everyone is different, but I hope we are contributing to the public service of this post!
Thisthisthisthis! My husband and & I are doing the scheduled sex thing right now (hello Monday Funday!) because I have zero drive but do enjoy the foreplay once it is happening, less so the sex which still feels a bit awkward & strange but perhaps we have not hit nine yet? We waited more like 10 weeks because my shit did not feel healed & I was having some severe body image issues which made me cry anytime my husband touched my midsection. Sooooo sexy. And then we waited another 2 weeks because that first time was Not Good. And then waited a bunch more weeks. And then started scheduling it & it is getting better. I’ve been telling my husband (and myself) that my lack of drive was due to breastfeeding, but of course have been secretly afraid that I am broken, so it is wonderful to read that others have experienced this.
It is so important to know that you’re not broken. You are NOT broken! You are cool. If you have undue pain, don’t be like idiot-me and think ‘I guess that’ll go away I’ll just suffer in silence for a few months’, and go get yourself checked out, but if it’s more ‘hmm, gee, I could have loaded an ENTIRE DISHWASHER in this amount of time, are we done yet?’ and body image, buy a frilly camisole that you can feel you’re hiding your stomach behind, let partner be all ‘yay, lace, let’s get this done in the amount of time it would take just to RINSE the dishes!’ and schedule yourself for a Labor Day Monday of Real Fun, Dishes Be Damned.
(Use paper plates for your Labor Day cookout, though, cause no one wants to deal with all that cleanup on Tuesday.)
I can’t swear that it’s breastfeeding, of course, but it’s definitely something to consider. No matter what, though, you’re not broken!
I am grateful for the vestiges of my sex drive that are present (12 months breastfeeding and counting), but I miiiiiiiss second base.
Some people aren’t ambivalent-to-negative about their breasts in a sexual context while breastfeeding, but I definitely was, which added on to the purely mechanical things.
Gosh. I sure do wish I could hop in my time machine, go back 10 years, and read your comment. I have a 10.5 year old and a 7.5 year old and I have always been mystified (and secretly shamed) about why I could not get with the regularly scheduled program for that first year after each of them were born. I guess it’s no coincidence that I weaned them both at 1 year and the program swiftly resumed thereafter. Seriously, thanks for this.
And thank you!
This is so great!!
First and second time, largely uncomplicated and no-injury births, I was back on the horse well within the 6 weeks and 9 times! And I feel spiritually understood by someone else who prioritizes sex over cleaning and sleep.
With #3, who was sunny-side-up, I actually ended up with severe burning pain even well after the 6 weeks, so I wanted to put in a good word for your friendly neighbourhood pelvic physiotherapist. I did not know why or how things were not going right, but it turned out I had some invisible nerve damage and she had me sorted in just a handful of sessions. It was remarkable, the improvement. So there’s another disclaimer to add to the pile – do not endure real pain, AND there are people there whose #1 job is fixing it if you have it, you’re not alone!
Bless your pelvic physiotherapist! When people make fun of the French covering getting-your-vag-back-in-shape treatment, I always think, well, they probably do a good job catching stuff like the above!
People make fun of the French for that? Instead of striving to shape our society to be more like theirs? 🙁
“instead of folding my clothes I just dump them in a ‘clean heap’ or a ‘dirty heap.'”
So you’re saying I can turn this habit into a sex thing once I have kids?
I wish I could blame that habit on the kids . . .
Can I add a thing?
I have discovered, even years hence, that having a baby has turned my sexuality on its head. And not in a bad way! It is not a matter of wanting less or more, just different. Which is kind of awesome, actually – I am basically getting to try out being a different person sexually.
Like Nicole, I am feeling the urge to footnote like mad, so let me indulge it for a moment. This may not happen to you, you may not like it if it does, etc. etc. but I think it’s pretty cool and I wish someone had said it to me so I’m saying it to all of you now.
Yeah, I want to not be too TMI, but this had been my experience too. Whatever minor anatomical and/or psychological rearrangement went on has actually been good, particularly post-weaning. Most of the message women get about postpartum sexuality is basically, “You will be a husk of your former self,” which is really a bummer because it’s a very nuanced thing in real life.
Likewise, post-weaning.
How and when do you have sex when kids are around? Do you have people who watch your children for you? if the toddler is awake (and she is always awake), how do you do it?
My toddler is now in preschool. Before, in order to have this job that results in words for you to read, I hired babysitters so I could work from home, and sometimes have sex.
We leave the baby in daycare Friday afternoons (I’m off Friday afternoons, Mr. LF is off every other Friday) and often we do it then.
Spend a night away from the toddler. Her not sleeping will become someone else’s problem for 12-24 hours.
STEALTH. That is all. You have to act fast and often in the middle of the night. If you are both awake enough.
I 100% schedule that shit. We have an agreement where we go out every other Friday night, and that is Our Night. Even if we come back having had 17 fried appetizers and like six beers each and there are just Too Many Carbs to make getting it on even remotely comfortable, we lock the door and watch a movie instead and then do it in the morning before the kids wake up.
(Our kids are old enough to work Netflix, though, which helps. We also just lock the door and tell them YES YOU CAN WATCH THE WIMPY KID MOVIES GO AWAY NOW.)
Nap time on the weekends if you can swing it (I often couldn’t/didn’t – it seemed like there was always laundry to fold and dishwashers to load, but the times it happened were amazing because we were both awake and could squeeze in a little catnap afterwards).
(The reason I basically never write things about kids is that I stuff everything so full of disclaimers that it becomes pointless, but I really cringe when I read things for moms that AREN’T full of disclaimers, so there you are.)
The disclaimers have their own disclaimer, and that’s really sweet. I like it.
“Just be yourself, whatever that is, and do exactly what you want. I hope you have a rich and satisfying life, and I love you.”
I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having any but I’m crashing this comment section because I think we all should hear that way more often.
I was so the opposite on this. I wish I’d waited three months and really let things heal instead of hopping on the stick at 8 weeks post-partum. Sex didn’t feel okay until 6 months pp and then was just okay until 9 month pp, but I also had one of those births unkind people like to tell pregnant women about in vivid detail. At a year pp, sex was AWESOME and it’s just gotten better and better, way better than before having a kid.
Thanks for writing and posting this, Nicole! I laughed until I cried, and I agree with all the parts that I can relate to! Keep these coming!!
Sex was excruciating for me until around 16 weeks PP – something finally finished healing I think (I didn’t even tear, but it was still all messed up!). Now things have been rearranged, but in an awesome way.
Except Mr. LF seems to prefer mopping and folding his laundry to boning me.
When Mr Daki did chores in our infant / toddler years, it was a very deliberate response to my comment that my not having to mop or do dishes was, essentially, foreplay for the overwhelmed mom. Even if I wasn’t physically tired, my brain was tired from thinking about all the THINGS. So he took over some of the things, I reinforced how sexy that was, and yay. Tell Mr. LF his butt looks good when he mops & that carrying the laundry basket really highlights the muscles in his forearms. 🙂
I’m afraid that would just encourage him! (What I need is for him to do less mopping and more sexing.)
Though, to be fair, I suppose I ought to add that, since mini-LF is in daycare, licking all sorts of disgusting things (like other babies), 75% of the time at least one of us is too sick to do it anyway.
Just tell him about the hot mopping buns WHILE he’s mopping / cut to: overturned bucket, suds spilling across floor….
It’s worth a shot anyway!
One additional thing. Getting going with the sex-having is often kind of a planned, unspontaneous thing once you have little kids, and it’s really helpful to accept that sex doesnt HAVE to be spontaneous, that a little awkward “Ok let’s get going with this”-style vibing will now accompany some of your sex-having, and that is OK, that is not a sign of failure.
Amen to this – a sense of mature biological perspective is so beneficial, which in my experience that often looks a lot like immaturity and cracking wise and just being in it together.
And couples who have undergone even a bit of ovulation calendaring, much less more assertive tracking of their fertility, may already have baggage to do with sex & spontaneity.
It’s important to give yourselves permission to keep a schedule for a while. Put sex on the calendar, but make it a point to be physically affectionate and spontaneous in non-sex-is-the-goal ways, as well, to build up your spontaneous bank. Big kiss on the way out the door, text a sweet message during the day (that has nothing to do with kids, work, chores), cuddle & flip through the wedding album while watching tv. And when the phone alert goes off, follow Nicole’s advice above.
The spontaneity will take over from the schedule, but stressing over when that will happen is counterproductive.
This this this.
It’s also helpful, though unromantic, to think of sex the way you (might) think of going to the gym: it can sound like too much work and be hard to get started, but do you ever regret having gone?
Depends on who’s looking at my naked sweaty body afterwards!
I’m a young person who may consider having children in the (distant) future, and I cannot tell you how reassuring it is to hear realistic and non-terrifying descriptions of being a parent and all that that entails. Pop culture hasn’t really figured out how to do that. So, thanks!
SAME!
Amazing post, Nicole. You are a gift.
I don’t have tiny humans, and I don’t plan on making any, but I found this interesting to read, and I am very glad you include disclaimers! Advice can be helpful, because we are all so similar, but it can’t be useful for everyone because we are all so different. I just always end up enjoying reading advice, even if it doesn’t pertain to my life, because it does allow me to learn a bit more about the road not taken. Anyhoo, here’s some approval from a stranger on the internet, given freely, so knowingly low value.
This is great and it is also true of non-sex things.
Like lots of people insisted to me (INSISTED!!!!) that Inwouldn’t have time for things like reading Literature after popping out a baby. Like the only thing my lady-brain would be ANY good for any longer would be, say, breathlessly paging through a women’s mag or a Harlequin romance. I would just have NO TIME, the argument went, and I wouldn’t care any more, and I wouldn’t have the brain space to anyways.
It is total and utter bullshit. If getting back up on ze horse is a priority (whatever “ze horse” actually is: sex or modernist novels, whatevs) you can make time for it.
I have totally thrown my laundry on the floor and given my kid a granola bar so I could read Virginia Woolf.
My grandmother (a lifelong bookworm) had six kids within 10 years, and still managed to read quite a bit somehow. It can be done!!
Sooooo, is this a safe space where I can get something off my chest?
Since having children, my husband I basically never have sex anymore. I think we actually fall into the category of “sexless marriage,” because we maaaaaaybe have sex 5 or 6 times a year. I am just not interested, and we have fallen out of the habit. Aside from when we first met (when we fucked like rabbits), we haven’t ever been one of those couples that has a crazy hot and frequent sex life, but after kids? Basically non-existent. We both say we want to do it more, but then nothing much ever comes of it. We’ve been married 8 years, together for 10, and our kids are 5 and 7.
FWIW, I do feel self-conscious and – yes, ashamed – about my post-giant-baby vagina. My son was over 10 pounds with a head circumference of nearly 16″, and the tight vag that I was unreasonably proud of pre-child has turned into a cavern. I do all the stuff you are supposed to do to tighten things up, but there’s only so much that you can do after something that huge has come through such a small space.
All of this makes me feel sad and unfeminine.
I can sympathize with this. It’s hard to get sexy when you’re not feeling sexy hey? I have a totally different relationship with my body after kids and sometimes I feel so… functional that it’s hard to feel sexual. My functional boobs. My functional uterus. My functional vagina.
Yes, absolutely. At least I don’t nurse my kids anymore*, but while I did, I found it impossible to regard my breasts as sex objects (and prior to having kids, I LOVED me some boob play). I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that my husband couldn’t regard them in a sexual context, either, but it meant that an entire erogenous zone just went POOF! I still haven’t quite regained my pre-children sense of them as being sexual; I hope I do someday.
*Not that 5-year-old has reconciled himself to this fact. I have to fish his hand out of my shirt 20 damn times a day!
That sounds really hard and awful, I’m sorry. I am not a possessor of children, but I found the work of Emily Nagoski (and her blog the Dirty Normal) very helpful in thinking about a lot of things related to female sexuality. I urge you to check her out, as she talks about a lot of the things that it seems you are thinking about.
Thank you; I will definitely check her work out.
Edited to add — now I’m reading her blog, and I’m near tears because she is speaking to me so strongly. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Thank you.
I am so glad my suggestion was helpful!
I do not at all want to sound like I’m giving you advice, but I do want you to know that my kids are 10 and 7 and the oldest turning 7/8 was a a turning point for me on a lot of fronts. I feel like before that point I was in the Land of Little Children where every action required a weighing of interests where mine usually lost. I put all of my dark places and deepest worries on hold for those first 8 years until I finally was out of the Land of Little Children and into the Land of Children Who Sleep Through the Night and now the Land of Children Who Can Watch TV Alone And Not Die For 30 Minutes While Mom Goes On A Run (the best one yet, though it barely beats out the joyous novelty of the Land of Children Who Can Buckle Their Own Carseats).
It’s not that everything got better, but more that I had more time and energy to start thinking about myself again and putting myself at the top of the resource list every once in awhile. Like I had spent years with this shapeless anxiety/shame because I felt different from all the other mothers in our social group (for weird reasons too boring to go into), but I never had time to really think about it or process it, so I just felt it (all. the. time). But as our youngest got more independent I felt like I had more time and energy (and more sleep) to process it and really think about what I could reasonably change and just accept some things that weren’t going to change and realize that was far from the end of the fucking world for me, all things considered. And suddenly a year ago I felt like I had a good grasp on the whole issue — not that any of the facts changed or that I wasn’t still anxious and shamed, just that I could see the outlines of the anxiety/shame, it wasn’t some formless dark cloud over my whole life, and I could see how I wanted to think about it and how much weight I wanted it to have in the rest of my life and have a goal I could work towards.
So I guess what I’m wanting to tell you is that. for me, my brain’s anxiety about my social awkwardness was blown out of proportion because I didn’t have the time/resources to devote to dealing with it while I had small children but I was able to understand and cope with it much better as they got older, and I hope that you find the same to be true with your worries about your vagina. (And for what it is worth and please don’t think it is worth more than my own personal anecdote, I will also tell you that I have found therapy incredibly helpful with my own body issues, which are so tangled up with other feelings about my own self worth.)
This is very, very helpful. Thank you. My husband often says that we are in the trenches right now (not so much because of the smallness of our children anymore, but because I’m a sole proprietor with a small business, he works full time and goes to school in the evenings, and one of our children has emotional difficulties that are very draining to deal with), and once we get out of the trenches and recover some semblance of normality, we will get our sex mojo back. I’m not sure what normal is anymore — we’ve been in this place of everything-feeling-like-an-emergency for so long that maybe this just IS normal.
All that aside, I cannot WAIT until I reach the land of children who can watch TV alone and not die (although in my house, it’s more “and not kill each other”). Tis the promised land, indeed!
It’s a phases thing. You are so close to the end of the Land of Little Children, as permanentmarker called it, and getting to that border makes a huge difference. (I figure that’s why “the seven year itch” was a Thing – people had kids right away, then had 5-8 years of Nonstop Parenting Action before getting fed up and getting distracted by fantasies about a life without story time and nutritious family dinners and parents too tired to nod goodnight, much less snuggle up.)
Have you & your partner talked about the small / enlarged vag issue? A bit of positive reinforcement from him could be helpful – and at the least if he knows what you’re feeling, he can approach your shared intimate life with more confidence and understanding? I’m speculating here, about Guy Ego, and wondering if he has taken your self-consciousness and sadness and decided it means you aren’t into his junk, so he’s tentative about letting you know that his junk would love to be buddies with your body just as it is. (Sometimes writing it down is easier than talking. If you’re feeling very much like you want to run away from the conversation, let your vag dictate the letter.)
Rebuilding intimacy starts with acknowledging that the status quo isn’t your ideal, and that’s not easy at all, if you’re not a couple who discusses your sex life. (For someone who now writes steamy romance novels for a living, I was notably bad at this in the Land of Little Children days.) And sadly, just saying ‘yep, we agree we’d really rather our sex life was a lot more active’ won’t flip that switch. You have to reach out and squeeze his hand as you pass in the hall. He has to stop to give you a kiss before turning to deal with whatever game your son insists he plays. Pinch his butt. Flash him as you change for bed. Send explicit and implicit messages that you guys want to want each other more, and be sure that your physical affection isn’t 100% sexward-bound.
(NB – he might say ‘no I’m happy with status quo’ – that’s obv not brilliant. But it’s unlikely. And if he does, it’s to do with his Guy Ego afraid to admit vulnerability, or it’s something underlying you don’t really want festering anyway, painful though it is to cauterize. Mostly though, I promise, guys want to have more sex and to know you’re hot for them.) (Gals, too.)
Good luck.
Hi. Thank you for your really thoughtful response.
I know my husband isn’t satisfied with the status quo – every time we DO have sex, he says “We need to do that more often!”, and sometimes he will look at me, sigh wistfully, and say “I wish we could be alone and have sex right now.” The note about including more touch in our lives is a good one — sometimes I’m so touched out by the end of the day that all I want is to not touch ANYBODY EVER AGAIN. When I push past that sensation, I’m glad I did, but it’s constantly a struggle to override it.
We have very delicately touched on the enlarged vag issue, and he’s told me that he has no complaints, but . . . . I know things are different. I can’t feel him nearly so well anymore (he’s of average size), so I know that he is feeling the equivalent sensation on the other end. Since there’s not much we can do about it, I’m a little reluctant to mention it again.
THIS IS OUTSTANDING and should be recommended reading for all new parents.
My oldest two are 13 months apart. From that one time we were too rushed to use a condom. Sigh.
Ok, I feel like I want to say stuff, even though I am a single girl with no plans to ever have children EVER. I have just had a coil fitted, and am SHIT SCARED of what sex will be like once I get around to having it again. I had a pelvic exam yesterday to check everything was in the right place, and I made noises like a dying animal, then my teeth chattered with fear and shock for about ten minutes afterwards. Anyway, If y’all can go through freakin’ CHILDBIRTH and then manage sexytimes, i’m comforted that I i’ll survive a lil’ coil insertion. in other comments/questions: Nicole, Can we have a “jenga marathon” for say a week or so? I know a lot of really bad people who deserve pillowing. Also, Christmas past’s hood looks like a gapey grey vagina, in a hilarious way. Was that intentional? dude, I hope that was intentional. Vagina humour is my kinda humour.
I love everything about this. I love it so much I’m saying so even though this post is “old” and lots of people have already loved it. I had my period _once_ between the births of my two sons. Also, should anyone be reading this, with my first pregnancy I had this problem where every time I had any kind of orgasm I would subsequently experience brain-paralyzingly unpleasant cramps that would often last up to 10 minutes. That was so weird I didn’t dare ask my doctor about it, but that turns out to be a “thing,” and mentioning that this is a thing is my little public service announcement… as a result of that situation, having sex for the first time something like 5 or 6 weeks after my first child was born was pretty awesome, being the end of a hopeless 7 month dry spell.
Oooh, might have saved my marriage here. And mucho thanks to the person who referred to Emily Nagoski. I’m a survivor, an elderly primigravida who had a tough pregnancy and a C-section, and had 2.5 years of PPD and buggerall sleep to start off life as a mum. Sex is painful and I have the brakes on all the time. It’s horrible. But now I know the Things are not mine alone and there are people who can help. YAY. THANK YOU.
I was on the minipill too! And breastfeeding! And I never got my period back either!