Excerpts from Sex
After Baby: Why There Is None
Non-fiction by Kathleen Hamilton
Download the excerpt in PDF
from Atlantic Books Today
A Thin Book
When I told my friend Melissa that I was writing
a book about Sex After Baby, she deadpanned, "Oh, so it will
be a thin book."
We laughed. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Humour
is how we deal with our pain.
I was born in 1961. I cut my teeth during the sexual
revolution. I grew up reading magazine articles about the distinctions
between clitoral and vaginal orgasms. I read Cosmo in my
teens, Erica Jong in my twenties, and BUST magazine in
my thirties. For my 40th birthday, one of my best friends gave me
a hardcover copy of Cynthia Heimel's Advanced Sex Tips for Girls:
This Time It's Personal, which I liked so much that I immediately
ordered all of her other titles.
I came of age believing that it was my birthright
to enjoy pleasurable sex and to make lots of different choices about
sex. I knew that sex was both power and pleasure. I experimented
with sex, I read about sex, and I sometimes talked openly about
sex with my friends and my lovers.
Call me naive, but I thought everything about sex
was way out in the open.
Well, pretty much nothing about sex after childbirth
is out in the open. Sex after baby is a big fat secret. It's in
the dictionary under taboo topic. No one, and I mean no one talks
about it.
I'm not overstating this. I did my research. I wanted
to be prepared for whatever changes were coming. During those months
of research and preparation, I happened across the following information
about sex after baby. Here it is, printed in its entirety. (Before
you settle in, you might want to get a glass of water, or pee, or
change into comfy pants.)
1) Women should "abstain from intercourse for
six weeks after the birth." (This is the nugget of wisdom contained
in all books written by doctors.)
2) A male doctor, in a daring departure from the
above-mentioned policy, wrote in his book that "the mother
may be less interested in sex because her needs for physical intimacy
are being met by the baby."
3) On Oprah, an author and mother advised new mothers
to both "lubricate and inebriate" themselves in preparation
for postnatal sex.
4) A close friend confided that he and his wife
had their first post-baby sex on the night of their baby's first
birthday. (Of course I thought they were freaks.)
That's it. The End.
-
How to Make a Scene at Baby Club
I figure, okay, the doctors say six weeks before
you should have sex after baby. Let's assume that's entirely arbitrary
(or maybe we'll come right out and say that it is utter nonsense
propagated by the medical profession to serve the interests of men)
and double it to twelve weeks. That's reasonable. But three months
after my baby's birth, I have no sexual desire whatsoever. This
alarms me. This worries me.
It's not a matter of climbing back on the horse
either. I try sex and it is lousy. It is painful and awkward and
there is no pleasure in it. I don't want it. Not only do I not want
it, but I am offended by it. Lousy sex offends me. Okay, so now
I'm worried and offended.
On Thursdays, I usually bring Cuyler to the local
Baby Club. There's hot coffee and there are comfy couches and other
moms to chat with. Coming here helps to break up the excruciatingly
long and lonely days, and somehow gives me hope that maybe I can
pull off this mothering thing. I first came here for prenatal classes,
and my doula, Sylvie, is the Baby-Club facilitator, so this is a
place where I feel at home.
Discussions at Baby Club are loose and meandering,
typically about cloth versus disposables, colic, and ear infections,
and I'm so hungry for intellectual stimulation, I usually try to
milk these conversations for every drop of interest I can squeeze
out. I pretend I'm the Oprah of Baby Club, drawing from the other
moms their nuggets of motherwordly wisdom.
On this particular day in late March, though, I
have something on my mind. And it's not teething. I arrive late
and see that Susana is there with her husband and their fifteen-month-old
daughter. I've met Susana before. We've chatted. She once dropped
by my house with a book she thought I'd like to read. There's a
younger woman there too, whose daughter has to wear a leg brace.
And Sylvie. They've been talking about the weather. The temperature
has turned mild early, which generally would be a good thing, but
at this time of year, on the island, it means that we're now looking
at a good six weeks of slopping about in slush and mud, with no
proper snow for brightening the winter landscape or for skiing.
"What about sex after baby," I blurt out.
All heads turn to me in amazement.
Only Susana is unrattled. "There is none,"
she says to me.
The others laugh nervously.
"Oh," I say. "Oh."
There is none. There is none. There is none.
"Because I have absolutely no desire,"
I tell her.
"Yes," she nods. "That's the way
it is."
"I mean I don't feel any desire." I tell
her. "Not even a tingle."
Sylvie's eyes dart back and forth between us. She's
no longer the facilitator; she's a wide-eyed bug on the wall.
"I think it must have to do with the nursing,"
says Susana, disengaging her baby from her breast and setting her
down on the floor to play. "I mean, physiologically, it doesn't
make sense while you're nursing a baby for you to run around having
sex and getting pregnant again, so your body doesn't produce the
hormones that make you feel horny. That's my theory. "
"Oh, " I say. Susana's baby is a full
year older than mine. Surely I'm not looking at another year of
lousy or no sex. "Jesus."
Now the younger mother pipes up. "Maybe you
and your husband could just be affectionate with each other,"
she says to me.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you could hold hands and talk."
I raise my eyebrows.
She warms to her topic. "Maybe this is a good
opportunity to remind yourselves of what attracted you to each other
in the first place."
"Yeah," I say. "I'm pretty sure that
was sex."
As I'm getting ready to leave for home, bundling
my baby into his car seat, Sylvie brushes past me and whispers,
"That was very brave of you."
Susana's husband shakes my hand and wishes me good
luck.
"And don't worry," he tells me, as he
sits on a bench and crosses a long leg. "There's a spot right
here by your ankle that you can rub. Go ahead, try it."
I sit on the bench and rub near my ankle where he
shows me. While I'm rubbing, I feel a familiar sensation, not in
my ankle. The instant I stop rubbing, the sensation disappears.
"That's great," I tell him. "Thanks."
He nods seriously. "You're welcome." And
heads out to the slushy parking lot after Susana and their baby.
The absurdity of this cracks me open a bit and my
"old self" (as in, "she's feeling like her old self")
breaks through and smiles. I think she actually giggles. Under normal
circumstances, I would go home right now and laugh with my husband
about the ankle-rubbing advice I just got at Baby Club. Under normal
circumstances, I'd be getting my friends to do this at parties.
But I have no way of knowing if my desire for sex will ever return.
I am no where near joking about this.
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