Sex after baby: Getting busy ... or not

Sex matters ... a lot. But for parents of a baby, nights can be sleepless and sexless. In their book "Love in the Time of Colic," sex therapist Ian Kerner and author Heidi Raykeil write about the struggles new parents face when trying to be intimate with each other again. An excerpt.

Welcome to the jungle
Lights. Camera ... Action?

Picture this: Mom and dad crawl into bed after finally getting the baby to sleep. For the moment, the little one is in the crib, and as much as they’d like to believe he’ll stay that way, they know it’s only a matter of time. For mom’s part, she just wants to read a few sentences of the same paragraph of the same novel she’s been mulling over and over and then close her eyes and snatch a few moments of precious sleep.

Dad, meanwhile, has other plans: he sidles on over, gently pushes away the novel and presses his body (and hard-on) against her. You’ve got to be kidding me, she thinks to herself. How can he even think of sex? There’s no way this is going to happen.

But tonight he’s determined; he won’t take her subtle back-turn as an answer. He knows he has a tiny window of time and has to act fast: maybe, just maybe, he’ll get some action: charity-sex ... hell, at this point anything other than his own hand would do. So she kisses him back, at first out of a sense of obligation. But soon, as she starts to remember long lost grown-up sensations, she does it because (what’s this) she kind of wants to! The force of his hunger puts her in touch with appetites of her own. (Maybe this guy isn’t so bad after all.) For a few precious moments they are back to being a couple — not just co-parents — with no thoughts other than each other. There is no world outside of this bedroom, no world outside of their touch.

Until the crying begins.

Although Dad has purposefully turned down the baby-monitor (a cheap ploy, he knows), the wails reverberate through the walls. He continues to kiss and grope, urging her to let the baby cry — it’s okay if he cries a little, he tries to reason, knowing in his gut it’s already a lost cause. And then he prays: please, please, please go back to sleep. For Pete’s sake, sleep.

But it’s already a fait accompli for Mom. Her whole body pulls toward the baby, her whole being is affected by his tiny little cries. She rushes up, throws on some old sweats, and soon returns to bed, cooing over the breathless baby latched to her breast. Dad knows his chance is shot. He turns away and faces the wall. Whereas minutes ago they were deeply connected, they are now a million miles apart.

Don’t be angry, she wants to say: it won’t always be like this. She reaches out to him, but he recoils at the touch, springs from the bed, and leaves the room, silently. From the bedroom, she hears him pacing and muttering under his breath. She doesn’t know whether to cry or curse him out.

Welcome to the jungle. Welcome to love in the time of colic.

Thanks to Carrie Bradshaw and company, our generation is now comfortable laughing about the big O over cosmos — and thanks to our modern metrosexual husbands, we can equally share diaper duty and hair creme. But as swinging and savvy as new parents are today, there’s still one very old-fashioned topic we just don’t know how to talk about: Sex. After. Baby.

These three words are spoken in hushed voices over play-dates and at playgrounds by mothers and fathers everywhere, stumped and shocked by the state of their sex lives. For a generation inculcated with individualism and weaned on sexual empowerment, we’re as surprised as anyone when our sex lives end up stale. But while we may whisper about it to our closest girlfriends, or make jokes after one too many beers with the guys, when it comes to talking with our partners about what’s really going on (or not going on, as the case may be) in our baby-proofed bedrooms, more and more of us find ourselves tongue tied and tip-toeing.

Ian’s story: “Hop on pop … please!”
If parenthood has taught me one thing it’s that, irrespective of my public persona as a relationship expert, I am far from being an expert in my own relationship. Like many a new father, life after baby #1 left me confused and conflicted, not to mention sleepless, sexless, hard-up and horny. And just when I thought life couldn’t get any hornier, along came baby #2 to take my horniness to new dimensions of dementia. There was a point when everything made me think of sex. One time my wife, Lisa, was reading the Dr. Seuss classic Hop on Pop to our toddler, Owen, and I found myself thinking, “Hey baby, why don’t you come over here and hop on this pop?”

Let me tell you: when even Dr. Seuss makes you think of sex, that’s when things have to change.

And this book is indeed about change: the changes that parenthood wreaks on your sex life, and how to adapt and master those changes without letting them masturbate, I mean master you. As you can see, I may be a sex therapist, but I’m first and foremost a guy and I’ve grappled, and continue to grapple, with these issues: interminable nights with all four of us squeezed into the bed; feeling sex-starved and pissed off; tuning out, turning off, and becoming prey to all the pitfalls that go along with that vulnerable state. As far as I’m concerned, there are no quick fixes, no 30-day plans for change, no clinical psychobabble — all I can promise is honesty, knowledge, experience, not to mention a guy’s perspective, as well as some tools and tricks to help you through the long day’s journey into night.

I’m ashamed to say it, but the truth is that on more than one night (way more than one night, actually) I’ve been that angry guy in the scene described earlier. The changes parenthood wrought on my sex life left me feeling rejected, dejected, angry, and spiteful. But instead of rising to the occasion and stepping up to the plate as a husband and father, I acted like an ass----, which is all the more ironic (and ass----y) since if anyone should know better it’s me!

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