4
Motherfucker: merging eros and the maternal
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Anatole France
If you pick up any pregnancy book and want to read about sex and desire, you will invariably find a scattering of information in the section, ‘Your Changing Relationship’. Women tell me that these few pages are painfully inadequate. What the books should really tell us is something we probably don’t want to hear.
With the coming of new life, there is often a death of erotic life. The sexual couple may dissolve, either temporarily or, for some, permanently. Having children challenges a couple’s sexual resilience. And diminished libido in the context of young children and family life may very well be the natural order of things. At least for women.
In this chapter we look at the relationship between eros and mothering. We explore changes in sex drive during pregnancy, birthing, and breastfeeding. Then we look at the effects of parenthood on marital satisfaction and the ways in which children can act as sensual rivals to a partner.
Pregnant eroticism
As we know from previous chapters, variations in libido between couples and among couples is customary; in fact, having perfectly matched desires is altogether rare. The physical, emotional, psychological and hormonal maelstrom of pregnancy further impacts upon sexual desire, and this can bring forth the unexpected. During the first trimester, owing to ailments such as nausea, vomiting, breast soreness, fatigue and the fear of hurting the baby, some women prefer to abstain. Fiona, 29, says, ‘I felt sick all the time. I was probably throwing up five times a day for the first three months. With my sex drive, I was like, Don’t even touch me. All I wanted to do was just sleep.’
One recent study found that 58 per cent of women experienced less desire than usual while pregnant, while 42 per cent had either the same or more desire (like a friend of mine who, during her first pregnancy, had ‘the best sex of my whole damn life’). Indeed, many pregnant women experience a general low–high–low rollercoaster of sexual desire, based on their trimester.
Women can experience the second trimester as a time of sexual vigour. Rising oestrogen levels can result in heightened sexual sensitivity, and increased blood flow to the pelvic area can intensify sexual response.
During the third trimester and leading to labour, sex generally becomes less inviting. Katie, 34, remembers: ‘Logistically sex is a lot harder. With the size it’s hard to ignore the presence of the baby and sometimes the baby kicked during sex, which my partner found disconcerting. It takes you away from being in the moment and reminds you that there’s a little person there.’ For women who have sexual concerns during pregnancy, be aware that numerous studies have highlighted health professionals’ lack of discussion about sexuality with women and their partners. In one study, fewer than one in three respondents reported that they had discussed sexual concerns with their doctors, with one third stating that they had broached the subject themselves.
Nevertheless, studies show that an active sex life during pregnancy is good for the pregnant woman and the relationship. But did you know that sex is also good for the baby? Orgasm releases endorphins that both mother and child can enjoy. The baby will feel a rush of happy hormones via the placenta and be soothed by the gentle contractions of the uterus. So instead of eating for two . . .
It is not only a woman’s libido that changes during pregnancy; our partner’s often changes also. In his book Private Lies, Frank Pittman argues that the transition period of couple to parenthood is a particularly high-risk time for male infidelity.1 Charming. And a 2007 study reported that pregnancy was one of the factors that made husbands more likely to cheat, especially if they already reported being dissatisfied with their marriage. The authors hypothesise that women’s declining interest through the course of pregnancy may contribute to marital tension and to their partner’s desire for extramarital relations. The study authors suggested intervention programs to help men ease into parenthood.2 Although it’s rare for women to have affairs during pregnancy and in the first months postpartum, 4 to 28 per cent of fathers report starting a new or continuing a pre-existing extramarital relationship.3
Pregnancy often marks the beginning of a shift of a woman’s affections from her partner to the newborn. Men, particularly, are often unaware about what offspring will mean in terms of their sex life and attention from their partner. Many men feel silently displaced and mistakenly think that it is only during pregnancy that their sex lives will suffer—not afterwards too.
Pregnancy alters our sexuality, our relationships and our bodies. Some women are shy about the attention pregnancy brings, some are proud, while others feel fat and unattractive.
Australian researcher Meredith Nash reports that pregnancy weight gain is one of the greatest sources of anxiety for women during their transition to motherhood. ‘The fashion statements Hollywood mothers are setting are tight, small pregnancy bumps,’ she notes, adding that these women ‘usually opt to have their babies at eight months and have a caesarean to reduce the likelihood of gaining weight’. Nash also observes that ‘Career women, who are in their late 30s and enjoy a fitness routine, find it difficult to not have control of their weight,’ and that ‘a lot of women are trying to put on the minimum amount of weight during pregnancy to avoid gaining weight after the birth of their child’.4
Indeed, in an era when beauty is equated with bony androgyny, feminist philosopher Iris Young writes: ‘To the degree that a woman derives a sense of self-worth from looking “sexy” in the manner promoted by dominant cultural images, she may experience her pregnant body as being ugly and alien.’5
Young suggests that during pregnancy, women can experience a heightened sense of their own sensuality and a profound sense of self-love. ‘The culture’s separation of pregnancy and sexuality can liberate her from the sexually objectifying gaze that alienates and instrumentalises her when in a nonpregnant state.’6
Young refers to the relationship of pregnant women to their bodies as ‘innocent narcissism’. Recalling her own pregnancy, she writes, ‘As I undress in the morning and evening, I gaze in the mirror for long minutes, without stealth or vanity. I do not appraise myself, ask whether I look good enough for others, but like a child take pleasure in discovering new things in my body.’7
Young says the notion of a single ‘self’ dissolves as the pregnant woman
. . . experiences her body as herself and not herself. Its inner movements belong to another being, yet they are not other, because her body boundaries shift and because her bodily self-location is focused on her trunk in addition to her head. This split subject appears in the eroticism of pregnancy, in which the woman can experience an innocent narcissism fed by reflection of her repressed experience of her own mother’s body. Pregnant existence entails, finally, a unique temporality of process and growth in which the woman can experience herself as a split between past and future.8
This magical time of being a self, a single entity, and growing another self that is both familiar and foreign, can mark an almost mystical change in a woman’s life.
There is a lesson here for us, even beyond the realm of pregnancy. We must learn how to marvel at our wondrous body, ever changing, and to experience it fully, without appraisal. By doing so we will be closer to having a truly dynamic and whole sense of sexual self.
Birth
Historically, giving birth has been understood as a natural female rite of passage, with women assisting other women. Some have called birthing transcendent and explored the erotic sensations experienced by women giving birth. The American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich writes:
Childbirth is (or may be) one aspect of the entire process of a woman’s life, beginning with her own expulsion from her mother’s body, her own sensual sucking or being held by a woman, through her earliest sensations of clitoral eroticism and the vulva as a source of pleasure, her growing sense of her own body and its strengths, her masturbation, her menses, her physical relationship to nature and to other human beings, her first and subsequent orgasmic experiences with another’s body, her conception, pregnancy, to the moment of first holding her child. But that moment is still only a point in the process if we conceive it not according to patriarchal ideas of childbirth as a kind of production, but as part of female experience.9
Rich even claims that if they give birth without obstetric injury, women have ‘biologically increased capacity for genital pleasure’.10 Anthropologist Sheila Kitzinger believes pregnancy and the experience of childbirth can even open a door to eroticism, and that the intensity of labour and drama of delivery may help women later let go during sexual activity.11
Unlike previous generations, most of us have never witnessed a birth or aided in one. Birth is now treated as a medical condition, for hospitals, not homes.
It is common these days to have one’s husband or partner present during the delivery of a baby. In fact, choosing not to have your partner in the delivery room is now akin to smoking in public whilst pregnant. Edit that, unless French.
Indeed birth—at least Western, moneyed birth—has become a joint affair. But this is an entirely new phenomenon. It was not the case for my mother. Nor for her mother, or my great-grandmother before her. Historically there was men’s business, there was women’s business, and that was that . . . until the 1970s. Besides burning their bras and exploring their vulvas, women wanted something else. They wanted male contribution. Blink and we’re in hospital beds with screaming woman, man at her side: a dove pair.
Nuclear set-ups have created one of the biggest social shifts in human history. Instead of living in extended family and clan networks, many of us now live in cities with a wife/ husband/partner and a mortgage, families often continents away, soothed by the cyber bandaids of Skype and Facebook.
The pregnant woman, her belly bellowing, the birthing woman, her body pushing, and the new mother, with a small infant needing milk, stand relatively alone. Who do they rely upon for support? Usually, the weight rests upon her nuclear construction: their partner, a scattering of often transient friends and themselves. This lack of helping hands leads directly into the death of a new mother’s libido. The danger is that the mort, the deadening of sex drive, solidifies and becomes her nominal identity as mother. Exhaustion and seduction were never close bedfellows.
This couple-centered paradigm has placed unexpected pressure on the relationship. In times past, a woman had her mother, aunts and sisters to help carry some of the domestic burden, both before and after the birth, and thus allow her time to be with her partner unbridled by child. Now, with man and woman having to play so many roles for each other, they are left lacking and can slowly become sexually diluted to one another.
During the lead-up to my first child’s birth, my husband sought the opinion of other fathers about their experience of their own children’s birth. (His research earned him home rewards.) Almost unanimously the sentiment was, ‘It’s a miracle, but stay away from the business end.’ The business end . . . the nether regions, where gore and danger lurk.
Yes, birth is amazing, the crowning miracle. But is it possible that we underestimate the effects on our partners of witnessing birth? Certainly there is an abundance of literature pertaining to vaginal trauma during birth that women experience, which consequently influences how they feel about their bodies, sex and desire. Yet for men there remains a silence around the negative aspects of birth participation, around the disturbance many men must feel seeing their lover’s vagina—previously a place of refuge, merging and pleasure—now tearing, bleeding and leaking. Particularly so when the delivery is complicated.
In our increasingly medicalised culture, where natural events are treated as medical conditions, excessive fear about the pain of childbirth is becoming commonplace. It even has a name: tokophobia. Some Western women face their fears by choosing a water birth accompanied by hypnotherapy and African drumming on their iPod. Others increasingly opt for a caesarean delivery. During the 1960s in Australia, only 4 per cent of women had caesareans. Now 29 per cent do. In many countries, researchers have found higher caesarean rates among privately insured women who, ironically, are at the lowest risk of birth complications.12
Interestingly, a 1997 study asked British obstetricians whether they themselves or their partners would undergo elective caesareans rather than a vaginal delivery; 17 per cent said they would, owing to fear of long-term anal sphincter damage or stress incontinence (100 per cent of respondents), fear of perineal damage (88 per cent), concern about the long-term effect of vaginal delivery on sexual function (58 per cent), fear of damage to the baby (39 per cent), and desire for a timed delivery (27 per cent).13 Victoria Beckham was dubbed ‘too posh to push’ for choosing to have a designer C-section without any compelling medical reason. Beckham is one of a number of celebs reportedly having early caesareans to avoid the final month of . . . abdominal stretching.
Indeed, while women are increasingly concerned about the impact a baby will have on their body shape, they’re also concerned about the shape of something a little more private: what I call the ‘vanity vagina’. Mandy, a young colleague of mine, comments:
Most of my friends say that they are going to have c-sections when the time comes for us to stop making cocktails and start making babies. They don’t want the ‘sausage in the grand canyon’ sex afterwards. A couple of the girls said they want to have lipo, tummy tucks and boob jobs with their caesareans. I hope this will change as we grow up a bit. It’s nice to look good but, I don’t know, I don’t think body should come before baby. And hubby should love you, baby weight or not.
One woman told me that her friend took part in a chat-room conversation on ‘c-section for a tight vagina’. This desire comes up time and time again in studies about childbirth, only worded more neutrally. C-sections are desired to preserve ‘sexual function’, ‘vaginal tone’ or ‘vaginal tonicity’, ‘to keep sexual performance intact’, or to maintain ‘aesthetics and sexual pleasure’.
In fact, at three to four months postpartum, women’s vaginas are mostly unchanged, although vaginal tension is slacker in about 20 per cent.14 Nevertheless, fears about the vagina remaining loose after delivery appear common. Amazingly, it appears that the c-section, originally an emergency procedure, has become routine, and is often done in pursuit of the vanity vagina proving even our birth canal isn’t immune to commercialism. Moreover, it seems that having a desirable-looking vagina is much more important for many women than their own desiring, reflecting a deep discomfort with their naked body.
For the new mother, birth isn’t just a beginning but a conclusion as well. As Iris Young writes:
It signals the close of a process that has been undergoing for nine months, the leaving of this unique body she has moved through, always surprising her in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her first child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear.11
Almost inevitable during the early years of childrearing is the demise of a mother’s self-identity as carefree, rapturous lover. New demands on an already busy life limit time and space for sensuality and for the couple. As such, the sexual self can become lost at sea. After reviewing the literature, pregnancy expert Kirsten von Sydow concluded that ‘the majority of couples have sexual problems immediately postpartum, and at least one-third of couples develop serious, long-lasting, psychosexual disturbances after the birth of their first baby’.16
Throughout history I doubt that most new mothers spent much time making love. They had other pressing things to attend to. Often, husbands found sexual pleasure elsewhere and were not condemned for doing so. Yet today we desire: excitement within familiarity, passion within monogamy, and sexuality within family. Many people trying to realise these expectations in their everyday lives find their relationship ultimately lacking.
Postnatal depression
A woman in her mid-30s told me she experienced depression after her son was born and that this alienated her partner. ‘He was like, What’s the matter with you, our life is brilliant, we have a baby, why are you being like this? It seems to me that there was nothing to do to shift the anxiety and stress. You know everything is good on the surface, that’s why your partner can’t comprehend it. Sexually I was completely mute . . . I didn’t have a sexual pulse in my body.’
Although postnatal depression is not our focus here, let us look briefly at its occurrence and risk factors.
Postnatal depression may develop suddenly or gradually between one month and one year after the birth of a baby. It affects almost 16 per cent of new mothers in Australia.17
Physical, biological and psychological factors include: a history of depression and/or anxiety, a stressful pregnancy, depression during the current pregnancy, a family history of mental disorders, past abuse, a difficult labour, being single, problems with the baby’s health, and issues associated with breastfeeding.18
Symptoms may include mood changes (e.g., feeling anxious, depressed, tearful), obsessional thoughts or thought changes (e.g., guilt, feeling hopeless), behaviour changes (e.g., lack of motivation), physical changes (e.g., lacking energy, poor concentration), finding it hard to love the baby, feeling angry, and having problems with loved ones.
A 2009 study of depression among Chinese and Caucasian women found that they experienced a discrepancy between the reality of motherhood and how it is portrayed in the media:
The Australian women described the cultural image of motherhood—the superwoman myth crossed with the image of the Mother-Madonna—and said that Madonna-style motherhood as an ideal was relentless . . . One said: ‘Those lovely commercial advertisements, which exist on television, in the newspapers, and in books and magazines and are for baby soap or shampoo, diapers, baby food, or baby clothes. They portray a smiling baby with a serene mother, and they contain wonderful soft fuzziness.’19
Guilt was the predominant emotion underlying the women’s depression. They felt guilty for not being able to take proper care of the baby and the household. This sense of guilt was a barrier to reaching out for help and made the women feel that they had no right to care for themselves. One said: ‘I constantly felt guilty because . . . as a mum I should be aware of all that sort of stuff [cleaning the house] and I should be looking after all that stuff [laundry, dishes, etc].’20
Women suffering from postnatal depression should contact their local doctor, visit www.beyondblue.org.au or call the Beyond Blue info line, 1300 224 636.
Mummy tummy
A friend of mine’s mother is encouraging her to have children while she’s still ‘young’. Not because she might have more energy dealing with the terrible twos, totalitarian threes and frightening fours. Not because fertility falls after age 35. No, my friend’s mother wants her to have children as soon as possible so she can get her figure back. Supposedly, if a woman reproduces early it’s more likely she will bounce back into shape. For those of us over 30, the only things likely to bounce are droopy breasts and mummy tummies.
On warm days, you’ll find my son and me at the local outdoor pool. While we wade in the baby pool, I look across to the other side of the swimming centre. Here women who have obviously spent a lot time in the gym flutter about in the water, stride around as though on a catwalk, or lay exposing their little derrières to the sun. And almost all of them wear bikinis. The women around me, applying sunscreen to squealing toddlers, have on another costume altogether: the one-piece or T-shirt ensemble.
Women are rarely prepared for the shape of motherhood. British doctor Lorraine Ishak believes that only one in ten women can expect to revert to their pre-pregnancy shape and size. ‘Recovery’, in her opinion, isn’t so much about age—although loss of skin elasticity is part of the ageing process—but rather about genetics and body shape. Regardless of diet and exercise, Ishak says, weight gain, slackening breasts, loose stomach skin and stretch marks are inescapable badges of motherhood.21 But she would say that, wouldn’t she, being a plastic surgeon?
On a US forum about body image post-baby, one mum wrote: ‘Frankly I’m beyond caring anymore. Yeah, I could lose 20 lb and plan to lose at least 10 of that by Easter, but it’s too much work to worry about it anymore! That extra baby weight is here to stay. Too bad the “baby” is 8½ years old!’ Another mum’s comment was, ‘Well, childbirth turned me into a marsupial. I could smuggle contraband with my extra pouch.’22
Mummy tummy anxiety is big business. Some mums luck out and regain their figure, some accept what they have and move on, some work out and try to resculpt, while others turn to surgery for a ‘mummy tuck’—a triple operation combining breast lift, tummy tuck and liposuction.
And then there are women like Marla (35, married, mother of young twins): ‘Before you have a baby, it’s much more about what you look like in the world. My body was more sexual or something—but also more superficial. But now, because your body has grown a baby and been through this phenomenal process, now there’s more substance to it.’
Myself, for now I’m going to stick to my side of the pool and just concentrate on playing pass-the-ball with my son.
Eros and the breastfeeding mother
No doubt about it, breastfeeding is sensual.
Any woman who has held a hungry baby in her arms and heard its cry for milk, or watched the satisfaction on her baby’s face as he engulfs her nipple, or seen her child finish a feed, head slackening, eyes rolling backwards as he enters oblivion, knows this secret.
Social anthropologist Sheila Kitzinger has described breast feeding as ‘a psychosexual process’23 which ‘involves a flow of sexual energy through a woman’s whole body’.24 Breastfeeding, like sex, is about desire, union and satiation. To a baby, bliss is milk, and to a mother, bliss is often being the one with the magic elixir.
According to Alison Bartlette’s book Breastwork, the eroticism of breastfeeding was widely discussed in the maternal literature in the 1960s and 1970s.25 Indeed, the landmark 1966 Masters and Johnson study of human sexuality reported that ‘women often become sexually aroused during nursing; some women have orgasms in this fashion’.26 Yet now, the recognised hormonal links between orgasm, childbirth and lactation are rarely mentioned. According to Kirsten von Sydow, one-third to one-half of mothers describe breastfeeding as erotic, and one-quarter have associated feelings of guilt.27
But certainly not all women feel sensual while breastfeeding. Plenty tell me they ‘feel like a cow’. An Irish woman in my mothers’ group wouldn’t breastfeed in public. When I asked why, she said, ‘Truthfully, my wee girl is a bit savage when nursing. I wouldn’t dare feed in public because she’d probably make a spectacle of herself.’
Nevertheless, many do find breastfeeding somewhat erotic. A study in Italy in the early 1980s found that the erotic potential of breastfeeding is often downplayed because it threatens to disrupt the ‘only erotic feeling allowed to the mother in a patriarchal society’.28 The feminist Germaine Greer writes, ‘In modern consumer society, the attack on mother–child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband’s fetishistic delectation.’29
We are taught not to acknowledge our maternal sensuality, but to censure it or keep silent. Voicing the pleasure involved in childrearing can be a volatile issue, as the following case indicates. In the US in the early 1990s, a woman had her child taken into protective custody for almost a year because she rang a volunteer helpline to discuss her feelings of mild arousal when breastfeeding her two-year-old daughter. She hoped to be put through to a breastfeeding support group. However, because of the ‘sexual nature’ of the call, it was forwarded to a rape crisis centre, which notified the police, suspecting child abuse. She was charged with ‘sexual abuse in the first degree’—specifically ‘mouth to breast contact’ and ‘hand to breast contact’, though the charge was eventually dropped.30
It’s no wonder that breastfeeding brings pleasure. The chemicals released in our brain during breastfeeding are the same ones released during lovemaking.31 Suckling stimulates the nerve endings in the nipple and areola, signalling the pituitary gland to release the hormones prolactin and oxytocin. Prolactin causes the alveoli to take nutrients from the blood supply and turn them into breast milk. Oxytocin, also called the hormone of love, causes the cells around the alveoli to contract and eject milk down the milk ducts, a reflex called ‘let-down’. Hanging out with friends, cuddling a loved one, having sex and birthing can also induce oxytocin release.
It appears that oxytocin rushes arising from breastfeeding, and the sensuality of caring for a child, dampen desire towards our partners, and that prolactin, which decreases sexual desire, also deters us from resuming a sexual relationship. In fact, mothers who breastfeed longest resume intercourse later than other mothers, have slightly less sexual desire and experience less enjoyment from intercourse.32 Our chemical make-up, then, more or less supports sexual abstinence during the breastfeeding period. There is speculation that for some, the return of fertility also marks a return of sexual desire.
Yama-Uba and Kintaro by Utamaro.
It is often hard to transition from soft and nurturing nursing mother to sex vixen; it just seems too incongruent. While a small minority of women experience high libido during the breastfeeding period, and heightened feelings of tenderness can spill over to the sexual relationship, the sensation of being ‘touched out’ is common for many women. Having to service the newborn almost continuously leaves many women feeling that their partner’s desire to be intimate is just another pressure, another demand.
A new mother’s sensual focus turns to her baby, and unless checked can remain the spotlight of her desire for years to come. And although we may be designed this way, our cultural expectations of marriage mean that this shift can lead to discord.
During the nursing period, many men feel excluded. Their partner’s breasts can seem ‘off limits’ and taboo, and her sexuality can seem like lost territory.
For many women, the relationship with their child is their first experience of being awed by love. Since a baby changes and develops almost perceptibly by the hour, this fixation on the child can easily trump all else. Women who are lonely or in romantically disenchanted relationships may be in peril of developing overzealous intimacy with their offspring.
Love for her child is often greater and deeper than a woman has ever experienced. This is not what she expected, nor is it something she discusses, or necessarily even acknowledges to herself. Instead, it often manifests in her behaviour—in her daily choices to put her child’s needs before her partner’s and her own.
Early parenting and the sensual rival
Beyond birth comes nursing and physical relationship with an infant, and these are enmeshed with sexuality, with the ebb and flow of ovulation and menses, of sexual desire.
Adrienne Rich33
When I took my baby boy to the zoo for the first time, we saw zebras and giraffes and witnessed a tiger leap. We delighted in watching a family of gibbons. While the father swung about, the mother and baby gibbon grappled in a round of mock battles. When baby’s attacks became too truculent, mother swiped him in a giant blow, sending him sliding across the floor, cartoon-like. Baby would then dive back to her, but instead of continuing the mêlée, he’d collapse into her chest and begin suckling.
It struck me that my baby and I spend our time together in similar ways—breastfeeding, wrestling, cuddling, biting and making silly sounds that could easily come from the wild. It also struck me that taking my son to the zoo for the first time may have been more exciting than any date I’d ever been on.
The intimacies of mother and child, whether ape or human, are so physically and emotionally deep that nothing else can compare.
Ayelet Waldman became notorious for publishing one thought: that she loved her husband more than her children. So outraged were mother’s groups across the US by her 2005 New York Times essay, ‘Truly, Madly, Guiltily,’34 that Waldman was called forth by Oprah to defend herself.
In the essay Waldman explored her transition from focusing on her partner to her child. She said, she found it perplexing when new mothers described sex as the last thing on their mind. Health care providers generally recommend waiting six weeks before resuming intercourse to allow time for the cervix to close and any tears or a repaired episiotomy to heal, but well past this time the women were blaming their lack of sex drive on exhaustion. Waldman didn’t buy it; she felt something significant was missing from their explanations. Waldman wrote:
. . . the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife’s passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire.
Esther Perel, in Mating in Captivity,35 argues that many of us fall in love with our children. Child-centrality, Perel argues, has reached unprecedented, almost cult-like heights. The sociologist Tina Miller even suggests that children are replacing the father as the head of the household.36
Discussing maternal desire at my mothers’ group, a woman replied, ‘With your child it’s a different kind of love. It blows you away. I wasn’t expecting that, the strength of it, and how wrapped up I am. It’s hard to remember that you also love your husband. It sucks a lot of love out of you. I’m so preoccupied.’
One of the secrets of motherhood is that many women experience more intimacy with their children than with their partners. The touching, kissing, stroking and tending involved in the everyday care of young children can be sensual expressions of love.
If, as Perel contends, we fall in love with our babies as we once fell in love with lovers, we do so, similarly, to the exclusion of everybody else. As in any three-way relationship, someone soon feels left out. Within the context of a new family, it’s usually dad: mummy has other things on her mind, and sex is rarely one of them.
Perel believes that the transition from two people to three is one of the most profound changes a couple experiences, and that it can take years to come to terms with its effects. We enter parenthood, she writes, with strong sexual identities. And then a child enters the love pair and everything shifts—how we see ourselves, our relationship to our friends, families and bodies, our priorities, our resources, our work life, and especially our ideas about freedom and responsibility. Becoming a family means less time, privacy, freedom, sleep . . . and sex drive.
The physical play and intimacy between mother and child is part of what Noelle Oxenhandler calls ‘the eros of parenthood’. In her book of that title she writes, ‘Non-orgasmic, but nevertheless intensely sensual forms of embodied connection are at the heart of loving parent–child attachment, and part of the spectrum of affectionate exchange between individuals generally.’37 As Perel points out, this type of sensuality is more akin to female sexuality in general—diffuse and subjective rather than genital-focused.
Men can undergo a sexual shift alongside their partner’s transition. Their sex drive may diminish during pregnancy, in the delivery room, or after the birth, as it’s difficult for many men to see their former lover in this new entity, the mother. Yet most men don’t openly discuss their lowered libido. Not only is it risky to diss the sex appeal of mothers in these politically correct times, men also confront—consciously or not—a deep and ancient idea: the Madonna/whore complex, in which women are seen as either mother figures or sexual ones, never both. Eroticising the mother of their child, Perel writes, feels ‘too regressive, too incestuous, too oedipal’.38 She advises men to healthily objectify their partner; anything to distinguish her from ‘the mother’. Alternatively, a man’s sex drive may not dimish at all. Instead, his unmet sexual needs may fester.
Sex post-baby rarely happens in a spontaneous flurry. It’s not like you’re out having a gorgeous dinner in a gorgeous dress, thinking about what you want to do to your lover when you get home. More likely you’re having leftovers at home, thinking about what your partner hasn’t done around the house.
The family bed
I was told that in Japan it is common for mothers to have one big futon where she and all her children sleep, while the father sleeps alone in another part of the house. Indeed, for thousands of years sleeping with children has been standard practice for women. In many countries it is still customary. Having a family bed ensures that the child is warm and suits small houses. It may also improve night-time breastfeeding and sleeping for young children. There is some evidence, however, that babies who sleep with their mothers nurse more frequently than babies who sleep solo.
Most Westerners haven’t deliberately embraced the family bed, partly because there are conflicting beliefs about its safety. Nevertheless, many couples battling their children’s sleep disturbances have resigned themselves to waking up and bringing their discontented darlings to mummy or daddy’s bed. Although sleeping with infants is seen as a temporary solution to nighttime waking, it often becomes habitual.
The family bed often inadvertently demotes the adult relationship to second string. Having children in their bed limits the couple’s sex life. While in theory they can have sex elsewhere, parents of young children rarely have the motivation. Loss of couple time can lead to resentment, feelings of neglect, and celibacy. For a single mother, bed-sharing can replace her need for physical intimacy. If children become used to sleeping against a parent’s warm body, they may not want to return to their own room. So the family bed can lessen a couple’s sensual bond over time.
Having experienced both the family bed with our first child and having my second baby sleep in a different room, I can attest that there are wonders to each arrangement. Sleeping with my daughter was sumptuous. I would hold her against my chest and breathe her in throughout the night. I felt closer to her than to my son, who was religiously tucked into a bassinette beside the bed and then, after a few months, transferred to a cot in his very own room.
And yet. The family bed was one of leakage, where vomit, baby urine, litres of breast milk, and tears fell. It was not a place of conversation or book reading or holding my husband. In fact, having my husband there, on the other side of my little girl gave me licence to devour her baby scent, hot-water-bottle body and velveteen cheeks and view him like a watercolor: abstract and safe.
A friend of mine has always slept with her two children. Her husband, after many years of enduring these cramped quarters, has taken to sleeping in his daughter’s room . . . in her single bed . . . under a butterfly blanket. How incongruent: such an ultra-masculine man asleep beneath a plethora of butterflies. But this is another reality of parenthood. We stop loving our partners the way we used to. In focusing so singularly on the needs of our children, we unwittingly focus less on our partners.
Parenthood and marital satisfaction
Children do the strangest things to romance. In the 2004 movie Before Sunset, a character says, ‘I feel like I’m running a small nursery with someone I used to date.’ In a study of 93 married couples over a 10-year period, the psychologist Lawrence Kurdek identified two typical periods of relationship decline (defined as a decrease in marital passion, satisfaction, shared activities, and partner agreement).39 Generally, things started off delightfully, declined fairly rapidly over the first four years, then stabilised . . . and then declined again in about the eighth year of marriage. Not long after from the notorious seven-year itch.
The first decline boiled down to ‘normal adjustment to new roles’. The second was intertwined with the arrival of children. Kurdek also found that couples with children had lower marital quality after one year of marriage, and experienced steeper declines in marital quality, than couples without children. Other research has found that the wish to have a child increases happiness, but when the baby is born, happiness decreases, especially among fathers.40
In a 2003 analysis, Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell analysed 97 studies that compared the marital satisfaction of people with and without children, and correlated it with number of children. Unsurprisingly, mums reported loss of sleep and acute tiredness, a sense of jail-like confinement to the home, guilt at not being better mothers, worry about their appearance, and other dissatisfactions. Dads felt burdened by economic pressures resulting from their wife’s withdrawal from the workplace, and reported general disenchantment with the parental role and a decline in their wife’s sexual responsiveness.41
Numerous studies have shown that in modern Western society, conflicts over the sharing of housework, childcare and other responsibilities are common sources of friction. Women are often expected to take on a primarily caregiving role for the child, whereas men may be expected to take on a greater breadwinning role. A child can also threaten the parents’ career track. All that social climbing for nil?
Twenge and Campbell found that parenthood is harder among younger birth cohorts and harder in more recent years. I wonder what it tells us that we increasingly can’t cope and our marriages can’t take the hard work of marriage. They note: ‘For many people today, the preparenthood adult period is one of extraordinary freedom and self-focus. Consequently, there may be a greater contrast between young adult life and the early years of parenthood, a contrast that may make the transition more difficult and lead to greater marital dissatisfaction.’42 For many of us, life BC (before children) centred around choosing pleasure, be it via cash, romance, a career, friendships, leisure, relaxing, or travelling. This gap is further accentuated when couples have children later in life, when they are accustomed to such pleasures and freedoms.
The implications of Twenge and Campbell’s meta-analysis are rather depressing. They found that parents had significantly lower marital satisfaction than non-parents across 90 studies, and that there was a significant negative correlation between marital satisfaction and number of children. In fact, only 38 per cent of mothers of infants had high marital satisfaction, compared with 62 per cent of childless women, although the difference was less for women with older children. Parenthood had a stronger negative effect on women’s marital satisfaction than on men’s, and mothers of infants were the most dissatisfied. High socioeconomic groups also showed more marital dissatisfaction with parenthood than middle-class and low socioeconomic groups, leading the authors to write, ‘Parenthood has a greater effect on marital satisfaction when one is particularly well educated or well-off.’43 Amazing really, considering all those nanny hours.
A 2009 Swedish study explored changes in the relationships of 184 couples with small children. From the first interview to the second, four years later, couples reported a decrease in marital quality, especially with the birth of additional kids. Although the average frequency of sex hadn’t changed since the first survey—once or twice a month—being too tired for it had become a bigger problem.44
But what good is it to know that a decrease in marital satisfaction after the birth of a child is often due to role conflicts and restriction of freedom? Perhaps we can use this fact as a guide to foster more equitable sharing of responsibilities; to prompt us to praise our partner for his love and his parenting efforts, thereby fostering feelings of closeness to the children and to the marriage,45 and to use these findings to inform more reasonable expectations of love, partnership and child-raising. And perhaps, most importantly, we can use this information to stick up our finger at statistics and be one of the couples that make intimacy a priority, and keep our partnership sensuous.
Of course, strong, healthy marriages continue to function well after children enter the scene. Unstable relationships, on the other hand, can deteriorate. Children add much to a life, to the extent that they sometimes seem like the very meaning of it all. This meaningfulness grants many parents the grit to handle the reduction in satisfaction, adult sexuality and individual freedoms involved in parenting. However, neglecting the other person’s sexual needs in a relationship is dangerous. As Catherine Kohler-Riessman notes,46 for men sexuality is one of the main ways of achieving intimacy, and its absence often creates discontent, loneliness and emotional emptiness.
Rekindling maternal desire
With motherhood, much of what once gave you pleasure is zapped from your life. Things that you used to enjoy become quickly categorised as self-indulgent. Shopping for yourself is replaced by Costco trips, buying toilet paper by the barrel. Bikram yoga is replaced by baby ballet. And sex, goodness, is replaced by reading the same bedtime story night after night.
During courtship, libido has ample time to unfold. The slow build-up of sexual energy, heightened anticipation and spontaneity is what fuels desire. Family life, on the other hand, operates on routine and domesticity, which threaten the sensual process, as does maternal fatigue.
Many men have come a long way domestically and help us more than ever before. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were supposed to greet our husband after work with a drink for him in one hand and his slippers in the other, while simpering, ‘What else can I get for you, sweetie?’ Yet we women are still ruled by The List—that all-consuming list of things to do, to buy, to finish. The List extends beyond the kitchen cupboard. It sinks into the laundry room. Creeps into the garden bed. Nestles into the children’s toy chest. Frightens us in the bedroom mirror.
No space is free. There is always more to do, more to mend, and more not to forget. And, of course, there is always more to buy, fashioning us closer to the MILF, the ‘mother I’d like to fuck’.
How are we to unwind when we are always winding? How are we to unfold when we are always—literally—folding? The endlessness of the list prevents many women from living sensually and being able to relax ‘in the present’.
When we are constantly squeezed for time, former pastimes such as hobbies, exercise or sex can come to feel almost hedonistic. Unless we commit to keeping them a priority, such pleasures can fall right to the bottom of The List—below cleaning out the fridge and reheeling our shoes.
Worst of all, The List is invisible. Many of us grow resentful that our partners don’t seem to see it, that The List is ours alone.
In a scene in Sex in the City just before Miranda and Steve break up, Carrie asks Miranda what’s wrong. Miranda replies, ‘I don’t know. It’s like he’s a kid and I end up nagging him all the time. I’m Mean Mommy . . . and believe me, no one wants to fuck Mean Mommy.’
The List is a product of gender norms, whereby women serve the family’s needs. But as satisfying as it can be to prepare a hot meal on a cold night and to nurture our loved ones, what is the cost of not nurturing ourselves?
A balance is called for, a balance between serving ourselves and serving our family. Even though on many days, if not most, this seems impossible.
With motherhood, libido often gets pushed into the drawer along with paracetamol and recipes we may one day try. Setting our love life aside is not often a conscious decision. Rather, it is the result of many small, subtle decisions: each time we turn away from our partner’s embrace. Each choice not to engage with our own sensuality. Instead, we wait for the right moment: when we feel rested, when we feel sexy, when there is free time . . . But empty spaces in a mother’s life are few and far between. And when they do blissfully appear they often get filled with a sigh, a cup of tea, and feet up for the first time in hours. Not a penis.
Although we may convince ourselves that our sensuality is no longer so important, for many of us, seeing ourselves as sexual beings is fundamental to our emotional and physical health. It’s also what can keep relationships dynamic, providing that elusive spark.
There are, however, ways to create space in a hectic life so that sensuality is within reach. To begin, awareness of the sexual stalemate, and a decision to do something about it, is crucial. Then evaulate how you divide your time throughout the week, and work to redirect some of your creative sensuality. Take heed of sexologist’s common suggestion: quickies or planned sex. For parents, waiting until the mood strikes is the equivalent of a teenage girl waiting to be discovered by a modelling agent in a suburban mall.
Instead of seizing the perfect moment, be ready for any moment. When the toddler goes down for an afternoon kip, grab your partner and make your way to the bedroom for some sensual time out.
Scheduling sex may seem unerotic, but it at least means sex can take place. If not consciously made room for, desire may visit less often than the Tooth Fairy. After all, much of our previous dating experience contained an element of scheduling: booking a time and place, bathing and beautifying. Yet, because we did these things in the context of seduction, of dating, it is immune to criticism whereas in the context of the domestic or marital, planned intimacy seems forced. It’s a fairytale that everything lusty has to come about spontaneously. Consciously creating space for the sensual to unfold is a way to keep eros in sight.
As we will see in Chapter 5, desire encompasses the effort we make. Greater effort indicates greater desire, and rewarding behaviour is self-reinforcing.
Given that anticipation is one of the greatest igniters of desire, it makes sense to play with this. Although we can’t pretend to be swept off our feet, we can still enjoy the lead-up to sex. Erotic tension can be achieved by knowing adults-only time is scheduled and has been given priority. Merely being alone together sans children and doing things you both like can reaffirm connection.
Plan sex the same way you plan a night out. As in: meet you in our bedroom on 30 October, nude.
Who knows what deliciousness might unfold?