Postpartum sexy

October 17, 2010

(This post is about sex.)

A girlfriend of mine and I were moseying through town the other day, with our beautiful new babies in tow, when she confessed to me that she doesn’t want to become part of one of those married couples who never has sex. She and I both agreed that we love having sex with our respective husbands.

Incidentally, the idea that women don’t care about, or even like, sex was invented by the patriarchy to aid and abet a rape culture wherein men think they don’t have to perform well or worry about a woman’s feelings during sex because they’re convinced that women don’t like sex anyway, and men believe they can just take what they want from women because they deny that women care if they do. Stereotypical frat boys think this way…not all frat boys…indeed, not all boys. Heterosexual intercourse – or PIV, as the radical feminist Dworkinites refer to it, which makes it sound like a disease – is a very popular subject amongst the hetero females I know.

Gentlemen, many of us like sex and most of us could talk about it all day long (hence the high turnout at Friday’s mothering group meeting for which the theme was “relationships” – yeah, the main topic of that conversation was sex too).

My girlfriend and I discussed the fact that we both had attempted to have sex with our wonderful husbands since the birth of our children, 10 and seven weeks ago; but that our attempts had been painful and unsuccessful. (The sensation – if I may – is like tearing off a Band-Aid®…slowly…on the inside of your vagina. Why? Breastfeeding can lead to vaginal dryness. In short: without the proper lubricant, sex can hurt like hell!)

Why did we perceive that there are couples who “never” have sex? …because cynics like Bill Maher and others claim that marriage and children ruin sexuality in a relationship. …because it’s a punchline and a cliché that married people are unhappy under the sheets. …and because, when you’ve just had a baby and tried to resume your sex life – which was really good during pregnancy!!! – but your attempt fell flat, you worry that you’re in for a long dry spell. It’s the human condition to assume the worst, right?

Let me tell you how it all went down for us. My husband and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary on October 8th with dinner and a hotel room. He, being a romantic, went all out on the hotel room; this wasn’t a cheap motel, even though that’s what we were using it as. Years from now, I will tell this story as if we intended a romantic evening, but right now is the time for absolute truth…so – fuck it! – I confess that we both were looking to get our rocks off, sexually speaking. We hadn’t had sex since our daughter arrived nine weeks before. We felt emotionally ready to reconnect physically. I had been helping myself for a couple of weeks, thus I knew I possessed the urge. We knew that all we needed was the right time and place to get it on successfully. Or so we thought…

Our daughter was thriving so we asked my mother to watch her overnight. I booked our dogs into a boarding facility near the hotel. I wore real shoes instead of flip-flops – ahhhh…the sacrifices we make for l’amour. Everything was in place. I kissed Ellie “good-bye,” dropped off the dogs, and strolled breezily into the restaurant, tossing my hair as I went. My entrance was like a Pantene commercial. (Not really.)

Despite what awaited us following dinner, I savored a beet salad and halibut filet in a roasted tomato reduction, along with a great glass of Chianti. I checked in with my mother before dessert: a festive pumpkin cheesecake. (Truth be told, the highlight of the meal was the beet salad.) Our daughter had not, according my worst irrational fear, evaporated. She was merrily cooing, drooling and had taken a conference with the blue elephant who dangles from her bouncy seat. (On second thought, the dessert probably rocked…but I really missed Ellie by then, and so my memory has decided it was a bland cheesecake. Is it possible to love your child too much?)

We made our way up to the hotel suite so that I could change into flip-flops for a walk by the neighboring riverside (Hey, I wore pointy shoes with heels for almost two hours!) My husband decided he couldn’t wait for sex and so we began foreplay. I excused myself to put on some sexy lingerie, which I’d brought for fun. I looked pretty good, I thought. I’d managed to tuck the hanging folds of skin on my belly into some lacy knickers – pause for applause. (My appearance has not strayed too far from pre-pregnancy, I’ll have you know. While I’m still about 30 lbs. – or two clothing sizes – over what I’d like to be, I am only about 10 lbs. over my pre-pregnancy weight. And I haven’t yet cut my hair short indiscriminately or donned the so-called “Mom jeans,” despite my empty-baby-bag-of-a-gut.) The lingerie nicely displayed my full, round breasts. I felt really good about myself: not just my appearance, but my efforts to keep the sex alive and well in my marriage. (Fuck you, Bill Maher!)

My husband seemed pleased by my efforts too and told me so (he’s good about compliments). I pushed him back on the bed and straddled him. “Just don’t touch my breasts,” I warned. (The thing about breastfeeding, wonderful though I find it, is that it sort of hijacks your breasts. When they fill with milk and become engorged, they look like you’ve had implants and are large yet perky; but they hurt a lot. They’re hard and sore.) The fact that my husband couldn’t touch my breasts was tough for both of us: they’ve always been a great preoccupation for him during foreplay. And I enjoy that too…which is probably why, when I began to get aroused, I noticed that the right breast was particularly large yet perky.

“Shit! I’m engorged!” I shrieked. I got off the bed, grabbed my breast pump and ran into the bathroom for the second time since we’d entered the suite. Sexy, huh?! (Just nod and smile.)

“I’ll just be one moment,” I assured my hubby through the door. I opened the pump case, got out the motor, the rubber hose, the bottle and the nipple cover. I assembled said parts.

“Shit!”

There came a hesitant request for clarification from somewhere beyond the door.

“I forgot the rubber parts that connect to the hard plastic parts.” (At this point, there were hard parts all over the place, if you know what I mean. But the hard right breast had to be soothed as soon as possible.) I tried to hand express some milk from the nipple, but the milk just dripped slowly into the sink. That was not going to work. I exited the bathroom cupping my leaky boob.

“I’m sorry, Babe, but I really need those parts.” (Wait for it…) “Can you go home and get them?”

Can you believe it?! Can you believe I asked my horny husband to put his clothes on, descend to the parking garage, drive home to his mother-in-law, collect rubber breast pump parts, drive back to the expensive hotel suite and wait outside its bathroom door while his severely engorged wife – who was trying to be sexy, by the way – pumped milk from her no-longer-very-sexy breasts?

Well, I did. It had to be done.

And he went. I wrote down the pieces I needed. “They’re in the microwave sterilizer steamer (which is a big plastic dome resembling a cake carrier) by the sink in the kitchen.”

He nodded and told me, sweetheart that he is, that it wasn’t a big deal at all. I settled into the round window seat and looked out over the river. I studied the New York City skyline and almost forgot about my failure to achieve postpartum sexy and my sore and leaky right breast. I thought about how lucky I am to have such a wonderful best friend and husband. I thought about how blessed I am to have such a happy, healthy daughter. I thought about homelessness and hunger and rape and hatred…and how none of those things affect me right now. I thought about how much love I had accumulated; not just the love that I get from others, but the love that I give. I thought about beets and halibut and cheesecake and red wine and how delicious they all are. I thought about sex…and how I’d one day like to have it again…and…where the hell is he?!

About an hour after he’d departed, the suite door swung open and my husband sauntered through it bearing a cake carrier. “Howdy, Ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat. It was just like a scene from an old spaghetti western. (Not really.)

Just when I was about to ask him where he’d gotten a cake at close to midnight, I realized that my husband hadn’t just brought the three rubber pieces that I’d written about in detail on the back of an old receipt that had been hanging out at the bottom the abyss that is my handbag; he’d brought the entire steamer…and there was still water in it! Oh, J***…you carried that steamer all the way through the lobby of this fancy hotel, didn’t you? I thought with a laugh. You silly man. The thought of him being so desperate for sex that he didn’t fuck around with the parts of the breast pump freaked me out a little, though. I had failed him. I grabbed the steamer and went into the bathroom for the third and final time before sex.

I proceeded to pump something like 7 ounces from my right breast (the usual is 2 or 3 – I guess the alcohol helped things along)! I was so excited about the volume of milk that my body had made that I forgot I was trying to get postpartum sexy back. I ran out of the bathroom with the bottle in my hand and showed it to my husband. I mean, I wanted him to know that this was a serious situation he had helped me avoid. My right boob could have exploded or something! “See,” I said, dangling the bottle before his eyes. His face displayed quite possibly the most frustrated/defeated/exhausted/horrified/compassionate look I’d ever seen on a human being before. He waved me off. (That display probably wasn’t sexy of me either, was it?)

Well, as I mentioned earlier, the first time feels something like a slow Band-Aid rip. It was not good for me; but it did provide my husband with some relief. Needless to say, I was disappointed and scared. But after speaking with some other mothers about postpartum sex, I learned that it hurts like that for most women the first couple of times.

The thing about postpartum sexy is that it’s different from the kind of sexy we knew before. When you’re newly married without children and your husband brings you flowers or strokes your hair or rubs your feet after a long day…that’s sexy. I used to want to make love to my husband because of his goodness. But after pregnancy and childbirth, I have found that I love him the most when I observe his tender yet strong paternalism, and that can be harder to spot. At first, he didn’t seem to relate to Ellie the way I did. No surprise there as I had known her for almost a year before she emerged. He’s had significantly less time to bond with her than I. And speaking of bonding: some days, it feels as though all Ellie and I do is bond because I hold her for hours. By the time my husband gets home from work, I have reached my fill of human contact. What I really want is not sex but space…and chocolate.

I have tried to get to postpartum sexy for both of us. I’ve been looking for his new sexiness: his loving attention paid to our daughter. I have figured out ways to get the physical autonomy that I need so that I can spend time physically bonding with him too. I swim laps. I practice yoga. I shower. (New moms everywhere probably know how special showertime is!) I’ve even been known to put on scented lotion, and make-up…and high-heeled shoes.

But sexy really is a two-way street, isn’t it? My husband didn’t wear lingerie on hotel night. And he has taken to farting loudly and blaming the nearest small creature lately: “Oh, that was the dog/cat/baby,” he jokes. The first time he did this, it was funny, because they do fart often and without apology. But it has since gotten really tedious and gross. Before the baby, he used to quietly leave the room before passing gas. Why can’t he try to be postpartum sexy too?

He’ll get there. He loves Ellie more and more every day. And we know we have to talk to each other about what we want and need to move things forward. I asked him what I do that he finds sexy. He thought about it. “I think it’s really cute how you get embarrassed when you toot,” he confessed and grinned.

Well, at least somebody does.