This fabulous piece was written by a good friend of mine. I asked her to write it after I was amazed at how quickly she & her husband were able to rekindle the romance after their baby was born. Due to the personal nature of the topic she has chosen to have it posted anonymously. Enjoy!
How Our Love Life Survived the First Year of Parenting
Back when I was pregnant I used to think, “When I am a mama, I want to be a sexy mama, you know, like Heidi Klum. I’ll get right back to the gym and the nail salon and I’ll never get one of those horrible ‘mom’ haircuts.” There was a television commercial running at the time that illustrated this ideal for me. A beautiful woman is walking down the street, getting whistled at by a bunch of guys on their lunch break. When the woman passes, the camera reveals the baby on her back and the guys do a double-take. Yes, that is the mama I wanted to be. The stylish, hot, baby-toting mama with my short skirt and my sunglasses, getting whistled at on the street.
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| Oh Heidi.... |
Why was I so preoccupied with these thoughts in the first place? Because there is this horrible cultural stereotype that motherhood makes women fat and disheveled and unattractive to their husbands and all of that, especially the last part, filled me with absolute dread. Passion and romance are hugely central to my marriage and I was determined to make sure parenthood wouldn’t erode that. I swore to myself that no one would ever be able to accuse me of letting myself go and that our sex life wasn’t going to ever change.I used to think that sex was the ultimate form of intimacy, then I became a mother. Nobody ever tells you before you have a child how relentlessly physical mothering can be. But in fact mothering an infant is an all consuming physical activity. Considering a mother’s job description this shouldn’t be surprising, but it really did catch me off guard.Since my son arrived I have been unhesitatingly intimate with him. From the moment I first lifted him to my breast it began--the instinct to hold him and cuddle him and never put him down. And so I became an around-the-clock breastfeeding, sleep-sharing mother. I wear my baby in a carrier and comfort him at the breast. I respond to his cries with hugs and his laughter with kisses and at bedtime I nurse him to sleep.Intimacy with a baby is a completely different from any other kind of physical or emotional closeness. Affection is the conduit through which all parent/infant communication is transferred. Babies require it, and in copious amounts. A mother’s reward for this are the sweetest smiles and sounds in the world. Waking up to my son’s adoring face and joyful chatter is intensely fulfilling in a way that I could never have imagined before he arrived; and as soon as he could, he began to return my hugs and kisses with open arms and enthusiastic squeals.Luckily, this state of affairs entirely suits my personality, as my husband can attest. Before baby, my bottomless need for constant physical affection was being entirely met by him. I would make up love songs for him all day long as I showered him with kisses and entreaties to give me just one more hug on his way out the door. Now, as a mother, I spend almost every hour, day and night, in physical contact with my child. My attention, affection and random singing are almost all directed toward baby. It’s not to say that my feelings for my husband have downshifted. On the contrary, I love him even more. Parenting together and doing things as a family have increased our love and appreciation for each other enormously. But all my energy and most of my physical attentions are being channeled to the baby. This is an aspect of mothering that I never really expected.At first I was secretly worried that my husband wouldn’t approve somehow of how hands-on a mother I had turned out to be. But on my first Mother’s Day, when our son was about three and a half months old, I received a beautiful card (dictated from baby to papa) that said among other things, “Mama, thank you, you’re always there when I wake up.” It was the most validating observation that could have appeared on that card. What a relief to know that my husband not only recognized but appreciated the kind of mothering I was giving to our son. Instead of being jealous of my connection and my physical intimacy, he was encouraging it. To my amazement, my husband even happily welcomed our son into our bed and was rewarded by a baby who slept and dream-nursed through the night starting at six weeks, comfortably nestled between us.This arrangement was a radical shift for our marriage. We had been used to unlimited access to each other. Suddenly that was all pushed aside to give our son unlimited access to my milk and the reassuring touch of his parents. And although we were getting tons of affection from baby I missed our grown-up intimacy, too. “The baby’s asleep.” This whispered come-on would soon become an inside joke to us, as I’m sure it has become for new parents of every generation, but the first time I uttered it with raised eyebrows and a meaningful tone of voice it felt strangely grown-up, bizarre and maybe the tiniest bit naughty. I pulled the scrunchy out of my tangled ponytail and coyly adjusted my nursing bra. A giggle of recognition at the absurdness of the situation was just the push we needed to launch us into something so familiar and yet strangely foreign. That first real kiss, the kiss that promises and entices and unites, was such a powerful moment of rediscovery for me that I was overwhelmed by unexpected tears.Our early efforts were valiant, but as much as I tried to enjoy myself, my body just hadn’t healed--that would take another couple of months. On top of that, even the vocabulary of sex, the one that every couple carefully constructs and refines over the years--suddenly seems incongruous, silly and strange. The old words, the old ways, the old modes of flirtation, all those things just didn’t feel appropriate anymore. The woman I had been with all my preferences and fantasies seemed to have vanished. The mother that replaced her was timid, tongue-tied, almost virginal. Far from channeling my inner Heidi Klum, it seemed that I had morphed into plain old Heidi. Luckily, my husband is as patient as he is gentle. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was already falling short of my sexy-mama ideal--an ideal that was layered onto an even more powerful ideal of intensely passionate marriage. Not that I had much time to think or worry about this as I spent most of my waking (and half of my sleeping) hours breastfeeding. Motherhood had completely upended my biological priorities. The desperate urge to make a baby that had consumed me for years had finally been realized and now my body was telling me to focus on a new biological urge, taking care of this long awaited baby. The old me was full of passion, the new me mostly just wanted to snuggle.But in spite of all this weirdness we keep seeking stolen moments whenever we had the energy; make-out sessions during naptime are often interrupted by a crushing “wahhh,” on the baby monitor. So we regroup and try again at bedtime. And, perhaps as a result of our unwillingness to yield the passion that has aways been at the core of our marriage, something kind of wonderful has happened. A new kind of lovemaking has emerged out of all this upheaval--a comforting, low-key kind that dovetails beautifully into our new role as parents. And although it might be a quieter (don’t wake the baby) kind of passion, it is lovely, it connects us and, above all, it is deeply reassuring. As a mother my job is constant care-taking. As the partner in our marriage who stays home and runs the household (yes, I’m a housewife) I’m totally consumed with mundane repetitive tasks that I can’t stand. What do I need from my husband when we’re finally alone and the baby is asleep? I need someone to take care of me, someone to comfort me. And without being conscious of this, I realize looking back over the past year (our baby just turned one) that this is exactly what our love life has been about since we became parents. It changed because our needs changed. Here I was so worried that I was failing at being that sexy mama ideal. I was so terrified that maybe I wasn’t as exciting or fun as I used to be. But exciting, fun or high energy just isn’t what either of us has needed from each other as new parents. What we have needed is exactly what we’ve been giving each other--comfort, affection and a dreamy kind of escape that melts away our cares and renews our sense of connection after a harrowing day. Instead of trying to compare the way things were before baby to the way they have become, I now see I was looking at it all backwards. The right question to be asking was, were we fulfilled before, and are we still? The answer to both is a resounding yes. Hurray! To our great joy and relief, our romance has survived the first year of parenting. Emboldened and encouraged, we’re already trying for baby number two.
Photo Credit: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com
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