If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot lines to the story, color to the picture, darken everything, bring fear as never before, suggest the holy, explain the ferocity of the human mind, undo or redo some of the past while casting shadows into the future. There is no boredom with children in the home. The risks are high. The voltage crackling.
—Anne Roiphe, Married
SEX MAKES BABIES. SO IT is ironic that the child, the embodiment of the couple’s love, so often threatens the very romance that brought that child into being. Sex, which set the entire enterprise in motion, is often abandoned once children enter the picture. Even when children come by a different route, their impact on the sex life of the couple is no less dramatic. Many of the couples I see trace the demise of their erotic life back to the arrival of the first child. Why does parenthood so often deliver a fatal blow?
The transition from two to three is one of the most profound challenges a couple will ever face. It takes time—time measured in years, not weeks—to find our bearings in this brave new world. Having a baby is a psychological revolution that changes our relation to almost everything and everyone, from our sense of self and identity to our relations with our partners, friends, parents, and in-laws. Our bodies change. So do our finances and work lives. Priorities shift, roles are redefined, and the balance between freedom and responsibility undergoes a massive overhaul. We literally fall in love with our babies and, as we once understood with our mates, falling in love is an all-consuming affair that pushes everything else aside. The making of a family calls for a redistribution of resources and, for a while, there seems to be less for the couple: less time, less communication, less sleep, less money, less freedom, less touch, less intimacy, less privacy. Even though couples talk about how happy they are as a growing family and how fulfilled they are individually, they nevertheless describe these shifts as taxing to their relationship.
Eventually, most of us come to recognize ourselves again within this new context of family. At best, we become more adept at the basic skills of caretaking. We establish the support we need. We lay out a division of labor, both domestically and professionally, that everyone can live with. We arrange for child care; we bond with other parents; we steal time in bits and pieces and get brief intermissions for ourselves. With any luck, we sleep through the night. We start going to the gym again, we finish a magazine before the next issue arrives in the mail, and we manage to create some space where we can connect with each other as adults.
For some of us, this is when romance starts to work its way back into the fabric of our lives. We remember that sex is fun; it makes us feel good, and it makes us feel closer. As my friend Clara said, “It’s easy to forget that before we were parents, we were lovers. Sex reaffirms that for us. It reminds me that I chose Meyer because I love him; I’d choose him again today. For me, that’s romantic.”
But while some couples gravitate toward one another again, others slowly wander off on a path of mutual estrangement. Reclaiming erotic intimacy is not always easy. The case is often made that American parents today, regardless of class, are overworked and overwhelmed. As a consequence, we virtually schedule sex out of our lives, keeping it on permanent standby while we attend to more pressing matters. Family life can feel like ongoing triage: what needs my immediate attention, and what can I put off until later? We constantly sort conflicting demands into their appropriate hierarchical slots: The Crucial, The Important, The Dreamed of, The Ought-to, The Negligible, The Irrelevant, The Whatever, The Trifling, The “Maybe Someday,” The “Not in this lifetime.” Sex often remains firmly at the bottom of the to-do list, never relinquishing its last-place status to other, more mundane tasks.
But why does our erotic connection with our partner wind up so demoted? Does it really matter if the dishes aren’t done, or is there something more beneath our mysterious willingness to forgo sex? Perhaps there is something specific about our modern American culture that reinforces the erotic muting of moms and dads. Or perhaps eroticism in the context of family is simply too difficult for anyone to embrace.
Parenthood, Inc.
Safety and stability take on a whole new meaning when children enter the picture. Read any parenting book about infants and toddlers and what you’ll find over and over is an emphasis on routine, predictability, and regularity. For children to feel confident enough to go out into the world and explore on their own, they need a secure base. Parenthood demands that we become steady, dependable, and responsible. We plant ourselves firmly on the ground so that our kids may learn to fly. Even before a child arrives, we review our life insurance policies, buy a car with air bags, and move into the best (i.e., safest) neighborhood we can afford. We cut down on our drinking, finally quit smoking, and begin to keep something in the refrigerator besides a six-pack and condiments.
We do all this for our kids, but we also do it for ourselves. Facing the great unknown of parenthood, we try to establish as much security as we can. We seek to contain the unpredictable by creating structure. We organize; we prioritize; we become serious. In the process we cast aside what is frivolous, immature, irresponsible, reckless, excessive, and unproductive, for such things clash with the task at hand: building a family. “I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I’m not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.” “I’m a sculptor, but I took this job doing Power Point presentations for a high-end investment firm because the pay and the benefits are great and I’ll be vested after five years so I won’t have to worry about retirement and I can put all my extra money into Becky’s college fund” (all said without the speaker taking a breath). “No partying till five o’clock in the morning for me anymore, not when I have to get up at five-thirty—six-fifteen when the baby’s feeling generous.” “It was all spur-of-the-moment for us before the kids. We’d decide to go camping and we’d throw the tent into the car and go. I could call Dawn at the office at five-fifteen to tell her about a band that was playing at nine, and she’d always meet me there. Now we buy season tickets but wind up giving half of them away.”
Family life flourishes in an atmosphere of comfort and consistency. Yet eroticism resides in unpredictability, spontaneity, and risk. Eros is a force that doesn’t like to be constrained. When it settles into repetition, habit, or rules, it touches its death. It then is transformed into boredom and sometimes, more powerfully, into repulsion. Sex, a harbinger of loss of control, is fraught with uncertainty and vulnerability. But when kids come on the scene, our tolerance for these destabilizing emotions takes a dive. Perhaps this is why they are so often relegated to the fringes of family life. What eroticism thrives on, family life defends against.
Many of us become so immersed in our role as parents that we become unable to break free, even when we might. “I knew we were in trouble when I couldn’t even think about having sex until all the toys were put away,” my patient Stephanie reluctantly admits. “And then there are the dishes, the laundry, the bills, the dog. The list never ends. The chores always seem to win out, and intimacy between Warren and me gets lost in the shuffle. If someone were to ask me, ‘What would you rather do, mop the kitchen floor or make love to your husband?’ of course I would pick sex. But in real life? I push Warren away and grab that mop.”
It’s easy to disparage the mop. Like a lot of mothers (yes, mothers), Stephanie resents cleaning, even while she feels compelled to pursue the tidy household as a symbol of successful motherhood. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to cleanliness, as if order on the outside can bring peace on the inside. And, to some extent, it does. As odious as her to-do list might be, there is something about getting things done that gives her a sense of control and efficacy. Enough Cheerios and Goldfish for three weeks of snack-time. Clean closets. Shoes in the next two sizes up. These are activities with immediate and measurable results, far more manageable than the open-endedness and terrors of child rearing.
Children are a blessing, a delight, a wonder. They’re also a minor cataclysm. These cherished intruders fill us with a profound sense of vulnerability and lack of control. We dread the thought of something terrible happening to them or worse yet, of losing them. They hold us hostage to constant anxiety. We love them so much, and we want to protect them at all costs. We can numb these frightening thoughts or obsess about them, but in either case we want to get it right. Are they OK? How can you tell? Did I handle this well, or should we start saving up for therapy as well as college? In the face of these daunting questions, Stephanie runs for the mop, even when she doesn’t have to, because it provides a modicum of control in an otherwise emotionally chaotic environment.
Actually, Stephanie used to be quite a slob. “Before I had a child I never found myself cleaning the egg cups in the refrigerator. I was messy. Books everywhere, papers everywhere, and I never experienced it as a lack of control. It felt cozy to me. But now I feel this need to exert myself over my environment. It’s me against the mess, my personal battle against the forces of chaos that I know will take over the minute I turn my back to watch TV or, God forbid, to be intimate with my husband.”
Before Jake was born, Stephanie worked as an office manager in an international shipping firm. She had always planned on returning to work after her maternity leave, but Jake’s birth changed that. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him; and, after doing the math, she realized that most of her paycheck would go to the babysitter anyway. Five years have passed, and Sophia has come along. “With a five-year-old and a two-year-old, I’m on mother duty twenty-four-seven. If I have any time left, I just want it for myself. When Warren approaches me, it feels like one more person wanting something from me. I know that’s not his intention, but it’s how I feel. I don’t have anything left to give.”
“When did sexual intimacy become his need only? Don’t you miss the connection, too?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Not really. I keep thinking that it will come back, but I can’t say I miss it.”
While Stephanie’s desire has remained stagnant, Warren’s frustration has risen. “I’ve tried everything,” he tells me. “She asks for help; I give her help. I do the dishes; I let her sleep late on the weekends; I take the kids out so she can have some time to herself. But, you know, I work, too. I’m meeting deadlines all day long. It’s not like I’m having a picnic. She thinks all I want is to get laid, but that’s not it. I want to come home and be with my wife sometimes. But all I get is a woman who’s become all mother. It’s all about the kids. What we need to plan, what we need to do, what we need to buy. Can’t we just give it a rest once in a while?”
“Have you seen the movie Before Sunset?” I ask him. “At one point the main character, Jesse, says that he feels as though he’s running a day care center with someone he used to date.”
“Exactly!” Warren snaps.
“Do you ever have fun?” I ask.
“Oh, we have a good time. We do a lot together as a family, and I love that. We went apple picking last weekend. We ride our bikes, go to the park, that kind of thing. The kids are fantastic; we laugh a lot. Stephanie is a terrific mom. She’s always looking for something new to do together.”
“Together à deux, or together with all of you?”
“Together with all of us,” he grumbles.
Eros Redirected
Stephanie bursts with creativity: art projects, nature walks, trips to museums and fire stations, puppet shows, cookie cutting, cookie baking, cookie parties. Hardly a day goes by when she’s not thinking about something fun and new to do with the kids. Parental love throbs with vitality. Seeing Stephanie interact with her family, it is apparent that her playful energy did not disappear when she became a mother. Her life is filled with novelty and adventure, but it all takes place in relation to her kids, leaving Warren longing. The children are the adventure now.
If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks.
This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion.
In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs.
All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.
The Cult Status of Children
The sensuous pleasure of caring for small children is natural and universal. It is also wise from an evolutionary standpoint—the mother’s bond to her child is a powerful physiological response that ensures the infant’s survival. However, I’d like to make a distinction between the parent-child bond, on the one hand, and a recent culture of child rearing that has inflated this bond to astonishing levels, on the other.
Stephanie’s intense focus on her kids is not a mere idiosyncrasy—not simply her own personal style. In fact, this kind of overzealous parenting is a fairly recent trend that has, one hopes, reached its apex of folly. Childhood is indeed a pivotal stage of life that will inevitably shape the child’s future. But the last few decades have ushered in an emphasis on children’s happiness that would make our grandparents shudder. Childhood has been sanctified so that it no longer seems ridiculous for one adult to sacrifice herself entirely in order to foster the flawless and painless development of her offspring—a one-person, round-the-clock child rearing factory. This is a far cry from the days (not so long ago in America and still present in many parts of the world) when children were considered principally as collective economic assets, and women gave birth to many children in hope of keeping just a few. We no longer get work out of our children; today we get meaning.
Meanwhile, American individualism, with its emphasis on autonomy and personal responsibility, has left us between a rock and a hard place with regard to family life. On one hand, we vest our children with sentimental idealization, and we have a culture of child rearing that demands considerable emotional and material resources. On the other hand, our society notably lacks the public support necessary to complete this fundamental project. The basic services for our children—medicine, day care, and education—are beyond the reach of even many middle-class families. In our individualistic culture, we tend to “privatize” shortcomings of public policy by seeing them as personal failures. We are left with isolated domestic units: overworked parents deprived of extended families, kinship networks, and real institutional assistance. With grandma 3,000 miles away, and high-quality child care costing as much as $30,000 a year in some places (and the cost is still rising), couples are left gasping for air, space, time, and money.
The magnitude of child rearing, coupled with the scarcity of resources, affects mothers in particular, who carry most of the burden in heterosexual couples. And the problem doesn’t end there; for this unprecedented child-centrality is unfolding against the backdrop of romanticism that underscores modern marriage. Not only do we want to be perfect parents and give our children everything; we also want our marital relationships to be happy, fulfilled, sexually exciting, and emotionally intimate. Indeed, in our culture the survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple. But cultivating the ideal relationship requires care and attention, and this competes directly with the “full-contact” parenting many of us embrace. Utopian romance gets blasted by the realities of family life. Stephanie feels overwhelmed because, indeed, she is.
Warren Wants His Wife Back
Stephanie and Warren embody a common marital configuration: she is wrapped up in the kids, exhausted, and uninterested in sex; he is frustrated and lonely. She resents the fact that everything having to do with the kids and the house falls squarely on her shoulders, and she claims that if he were more helpful she’d be more inclined toward sex. She wishes they could sometimes be physical without having to go straight to sex, and complains that his demands are proof of his insensitivity. She alternates between resentment and guilt.
Warren feels displaced, and claims that he’s been fed a litany of excuses for years. “First she was too nauseated, then she was too tired, then she was too big. After Jake was born, it was the episiotomy, the nursing, the sore nipples. ‘Not now, I’m nursing Jake. Not now, I just finished nursing Jake. Not now, I have to nurse Jake later.’ Then she was too fat, too out of shape. We got it together briefly when we were trying to conceive Sophia, but now we’re right back to zero.” By the time they come to see me, they’re locked in a pattern. He initiates; she rebuffs him; he feels rejected and withdraws; she feels emotionally bereft and even more distrustful of his sexual motives. “We don’t get along well enough for me to even try,” she complains. They blame one another for their sexual unhappiness, and each holds the other responsible for making it better.
I am worried about them, and I let them know it. This is not because I think that a couple can’t have a viable relationship without sex—the absence of sexual desire, when it is mutual, is not necessarily an indicator of dissatisfaction. There are a lot of ways to be happily committed, and not all of them include sex. However, if one partner really misses sex and can’t engage the other, a pernicious downward spiral is set in motion. For these chronically disappointed partners, the absence of sexual intimacy creates an emotional desert. Sooner or later things come to a head. They rebel and find sex elsewhere: on line, or in flings, tricks, or affairs. Or they leave, even if that means waiting till the kids grow up. Or they stay but grow so bitter and resentful that you wish they’d leave. Warren and Stephanie seem headed in a troubling direction.
What Stephanie fails to see is that behind Warren’s nagging insistence is a yearning to be intimate with his wife. For him, sex is a prelude to intimacy, a pathway to emotional vulnerability. She responds to him as if he were one more needy child. She doesn’t realize that this is not just for him but for her, too. Like a lot of women, once she’s in the caretaking mode she has a hard time switching it off. She’s so mentally organized in terms of what she does for everyone else that she is unable to recognize when something is offered to her.
What Warren finds intolerable is that his approach is having the opposite effect of what he intends. He is desperate for a flicker of desire from Stephanie, but he wants it just to be there, sudden and whole, the way it is for him. I explain to him that expecting our partner to be in the mood just because we are is a setup for disappointment. We take lack of desire as a personal rejection, and forget that one of the great elixirs of passion is anticipation. You can’t force desire, but you can create an atmosphere where desire might unfurl. You can listen, invite, tease, kiss. You can tempt, compliment, romance, and seduce. All these tactics help to compose an erotic substratum from which your partner can more easily be lifted.
Even before Stephanie had children, her sexuality was always more receptive than initiating, and she rarely experienced spontaneous desire. In those days, Warren’s role was lavishly complementary: her coyness was dissipated by his assertiveness. He not only made her feel desired and desirable; he also made her feel desirous. He would entice her slowly, gradually awakening her senses, and she would eagerly respond. This responsiveness, so marked in the early days of their courtship, temporarily masked her characteristic lack of sexual agency (a trait shared by many women).
I point out to him that she might be more receptive today if he paid attention to cultivating her desire rather than simply monitoring it. For Stephanie, love and desire are inseparable. She needs to feel intimate before she can allow the vulnerability of sex; otherwise, she feels objectified. “Sometimes it feels like he just wants a release. It has nothing to do with me,” she says. “It’s a total turn-off.”
“Stephanie needs you to take the lead, but you can’t just buy her a ticket; you have to get her interested in the trip,” I tell Warren. “You play an important role as the keeper of the flame. Right now, all she feels is pressure. She experiences your come-ons as abrupt and intrusive. She thinks all you want is sex. Prove to her it’s not.”
Looking for Stephanie
It was harder for me to reach Stephanie, for she and I could not easily separate ourselves from the ideological pressures that lurked beneath the surface of our conversation. Validating her husband’s needs could easily be construed as denying hers. How to invite a woman to reconnect with her body and her sexuality, separately from her children, when she’s completely uninterested in either, or when she feels undeserving or too maxed out? How to avoid the pitfall of swinging back and forth between her children’s needs and her husband’s needs, leaving her own needs perennially unattended? I did not want to impose a bias about sex that would add more pressure to the mix.
What I said to her was this, “You’ll never hear me say that you should force yourself. Nothing is more deflating erotically than sex on demand. But I do believe that sex matters: for you, for your marriage, and for your kids. I am puzzled by your willingness to forgo such an important part of yourself. How did it come to be that, on the extensive list of things your children need, parents who have sex isn’t one of them?”
Many women struggle to integrate sexuality and motherhood. Ours is a culture that equates maternal devotion with selflessness: self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-denial. Stephanie has had years of putting the children first and forgetting herself altogether. She has relinquished her freedom and her independence—both cornerstones of desire—and has forsaken herself as a person in her own right. Reconnecting with her erotic self, separate from her maternal self, is crucial. Together we probe the elusiveness of her sexual agency. We explore her sexual history: how sexuality was expressed in her family while she was growing up, and what her earliest experiences were like. She tells me how awkward her own mother was about the subject of sex, never speaking frankly but only making veiled references to morality and sin. She has never thought of her mother as a sexual being, and it doesn’t escape me that history might be repeating itself.
We talk about how her sexual identity changed as a result of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and motherhood. Putting her personal experiences in a broader cultural context, we discuss how the politics of motherhood, the myth of chastity, and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth all conspire to deprive motherhood of its sexual elements. I recommend a gem of a book: Sexy Mamas, by Cathy Winks and Anne Semans, which discusses sexuality and motherhood in an accessible, down-to-earth, positive way. I suggest she leave it in plain view on her bedside table.
These conversations were an attempt to reintroduce sex to Stephanie’s psychic landscape, and help her to get a sense of herself as a sexual being. For years, she has consigned her desire to Warren, who has been slated for their erotic upkeep (along with the snow tires, the lawn, and the garbage). I know we are on to something when she blurts out, “I’ve been a sexual underachiever my whole life, and I resent Warren for feeling entitled to something that I won’t allow for myself!”
Together we shift the focus from self-denial to self-awareness. We explore how she might reclaim a right to pleasure, with its inherent threat of selfishness, in a way that doesn’t leave her feeling like a bad mother. One upshot of these discussions is that Stephanie does something radical (for her)—she goes on a weekend retreat with her sister, leaving Warren and the children to their own devices. Getting to that point took a lot of work, but I sense that before she can open herself to sex, she needs to expand the general domain of personal pleasure. Becoming more generous with herself, she might—I hope—be more receptive to her husband.
I’m not big on homework in therapy, especially when the list of domestic tasks is already endless. At the same time, action is a prerequisite for change. So I ask Warren and Stephanie, at the end of one session, to each do one thing differently in the next few weeks. They need not talk about it, for their effort will be measured not by its success but only by its intention. “I’d like you to stretch, to do something, anything, that takes you a step farther than usual.” To Warren I say, “We tend to do for others what we would like them to do for us, but it isn’t necessarily what they might want. Part of this is about working with and honoring your differences. At one time you pursued Stephanie with great creativity, but no more. There’s an assumption—and you’re not alone—that we need only pursue what we don’t yet possess. The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.”
At this point, sex has been relegated to what Warren wants and what Warren misses. Stephanie has shifted from being receptive to being reactive. It is a passive stance in which her main power is that of refusal. To her I suggest, “Keep in mind that there’s something limiting about an absolute no. What really hurts him is categorical rejection. You might find more freedom in ‘Maybe’ or ‘Let’s kiss’ or even ‘Talk me into it.’ Warren, more than anyone else, can help you to reconnect with the woman inside the mother. Can you imagine recruiting him rather than pushing him away? Invite him to invite you, and see what happens.”
Stephanie, consumed by motherhood, was too quick to dismiss the inherent value of Warren’s persistence. The way I see it, Warren provides a consistent reminder that erotic intimacy matters. With him, and through him, she potentially can begin to disentangle from the bond with her children and transfer some of her energy back to herself and her relationship with Warren. When the father reaches out to the mother, and the mother acknowledges him, redirecting her attention, this serves to rebalance the entire family. Boundaries get drawn, and new zoning regulations get put in place delineating areas that are adult only. Time, resources, playfulness, and fun are redistributed, and libido is rescued from forced retirement.
My work with gay and lesbian couples has led me to recognize that these dynamics are replicated whenever one parent, gender notwithstanding, takes charge of the kids. Since same-sex couples are not constrained by a traditional division of labor—women at home, men at work—they offer a useful basis for comparison. What I see over and over is that the person who takes on the role of primary caretaker almost always undergoes changes similar to Stephanie’s: a total immersion in the lives and rhythms of the children, a loss of self, and a greater difficulty extricating himself or herself from chores (a compulsion that is simultaneously frustrating and grounding).
The role of the more autonomous parent is to help the primary caregiver disengage from the kids and reallocate energy to the couple. “Leave the toys for now, nobody is going to give you a medal, go take a nap.” “You don’t have to make these pecan pies from scratch, you’ve done enough today.” “The nanny is here, let’s sit down for ten minutes and share a glass of wine before she leaves.” It’s a different approach from the traditional division of labor, one which emphasizes shared responsibility and mutuality and honors the interdependent agency of both partners.
When Warren asks, “Want to?” and Stephanie finally answers, “Convince me,” their dynamic begins to shift. This puts a halt to the grinding antagonism and introduces an overdue mutuality. Asking him to help her is, in itself, an expression of sexual assertiveness. And Warren, finally relieved of being the supplicant, can set out to get his wife back. His role as keeper of the flame is given new meaning.
Lifting the Erotic Embargo
Warren and Stephanie are headed in the right direction, but the forces of eros are not yet aligned. Warren’s most elaborate seduction rituals are thwarted, repeatedly and pitifully, by an unaccommodating home life. There is something absurd about the extent to which their lives revolve around their children: weekends filled with Pee Wee baseball and birthday parties; kids who go to bed a mere half hour before their parents; an open-door policy for the marital bed. In six years, Warren and Stephanie have not spent a single weekend together, away from their kids. They have stopped factoring their own needs into the family budget, and a babysitter is considered a rare luxury rather than a vital necessity. Simply put, they have never carved out the time and space they need to unwind and replenish themselves, either as individuals or as a couple. No longer focused on one another, they have turned to the children to compensate for what they are missing.
I have noticed over the years that child-centrality isn’t just a matter of lifestyle; it is sometimes an emotional configuration as well. Children are indeed a source of nurturance for adults. Their unconditional love and utter devotion infuse our lives with a heightened sense of meaning. The problem arises when we turn to them for what we no longer get from each other: a sense that we’re special, that we matter, that we’re not alone. When we transfer these adult emotional needs onto our children, we are placing too big a burden on them. In order to feel safe, kids need to know that there are limits to their power, and to what is surreptitiously asked of them. They need us to have our own loving relationships, in whatever form they take. When we are emotionally and sexually satisfied (at least reasonably so; let’s not get carried away here), we allow our children to experience their own independence with freedom and support.
If Warren and Stephanie are going to get their groove back, they need to free themselves, both emotionally and practically, from the disproportionate focus on their kids. Spontaneity is desirable, but the reality of family life demands planning. Couples without kids can initiate sex on a whim, but parents need to be more practical. Be it a regular date night, a weekend away every few months, or an extra half hour in the car, what matters is that couples cordon off erotic territory for themselves. When Warren and Stephanie balk at the idea of premeditated sex, I respond, “Planning can seem prosaic, but in fact it implies intentionality, and intentionality conveys value. When you plan for sex, what you’re really doing is affirming your erotic bond. It’s what you did when you were dating. Think of it as prolonged foreplay—from twenty minutes to two days.”
Planning has proved to be most useful for Stephanie. She elaborates, “Warren’s idea of a date is this: he approaches me for sex at eleven on Tuesday, and when I turn him down he says, ‘Can we have a date tomorrow night?’ I’ve had to explain to him that, for me, scheduled intercourse is not a date. I need to go out. I want food that someone else has cooked, on dishes that someone else is going to wash. When we go out, we talk, we kiss, we joke. We can finish a sentence without being interrupted. He pays attention to me, and it makes me feel sexy.”
Not only do their rendezvous help maintain the emotional connection so critical for Stephanie; they also help her to make the transition from full-time mom to lover. “For so long, my thinking about sex was about how to avoid it. Knowing that Warren and I have a date has helped me to anticipate it instead. I pamper myself. I take a shower, shave my legs, put on makeup. I make a special effort to block the negativity and to give myself permission just to be sexual.”
The story of Stephanie and Warren is typical of the effect of parenthood on eroticism, but it is only one among many. It is the story of a straight, white, legally married, middle-class couple whose egalitarian ideals and romantic aspirations were mercilessly undone in the transition from two to three. My work with them isn’t finished. Things have definitely improved, but for this couple, and for this woman, caring for small kids doesn’t agree with eroticism. I suspect that when they reach the next life stage—when the kids are both in school full time and Stephanie is back at work, as she plans—new energy will be released. In the meantime, thinking of this as but one phase in a lifelong relationship helps them remain patient and hopeful.
Sexy Mamas Do Exist
Today we arrive at parenthood with a sexual identity that’s often fully sprung. All of us benefited when sexuality was cut loose from reproduction. As regular users of birth control, we have been granted the privilege of a risk-free romp that can go on for years. We enjoy desire with impunity, at least for a time, and we expect sexual fulfillment in our committed relationships. For our parents and grandparents, sex after kids probably wasn’t all that different from sex before kids—pregnancy, and the heavy responsibility that went with it, was always a looming possibility. But for baby boomers and all who have followed, parenthood throws a wrench into our liberated, self-gratifying lifestyle. The “baby clash” is all the more galling because we have something to compare it with. “You used to love sex,” “We used to make love for hours,” and “I used to know how to turn you on,” are laments I frequently hear. We’re as flabbergasted as we are resentful when parenthood brings our fun to a screeching halt.
Both men and women face these changes, but not in the same way and certainly not equally. The liberation that so bolstered women’s sexuality has yet to cross the threshold of motherhood, which has not lost the aura of morality and even sanctity that it always had. Desexualization of the mother is a mainstay of traditionally patriarchal cultures, which makes the sexual invisibility of modern western mothers seem particularly acute. Perhaps it’s our Puritan legacy that strips motherhood of its sexual components; perhaps we are convinced that lustfulness conflicts with maternal duty.
Of course, there is more than one America, and cultural differences abound within this vast country. My friend June is quick to remind me that not all Americans came here on the Mayflower. “Black people are certainly not spared our share of sex problems, but we’re definitely a lot less hung up than you white folks,” she says. “Sex is a natural part of life, not some big dirty secret. My kids know I have sex; I knew my parents had sex. They’d put on Marvin Gaye, shut the bedroom door, and tell us we’d better not knock.” My Argentinean girlfriend jokes about how her husband calls her “mamita” in bed—what better way to co-opt the taboo? My Spanish colleague Susanna tells me that, in Madrid, her greatest sexual asset is her beautiful three-year-old son. “In New York it’s my accent, my hair, my legs, but definitely not my son.” My American patient Stacey, a white woman who lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, knows her demographics. “The only men who flirt with me are the West Indian pediatrician, the Russian dentist, the Italian baker, and the Puerto Rican grocer. The white guys? Forget it. If I’m with my kid, they look right past me.” A man with a baby in tow gets a very different response. It’s not just power that is an aphrodisiac. A guy walking down the street with a toddler on his shoulders projects stability, commitment, and nurturing. For most women (and some gay men), that’s sexy.
In his book Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik contrasts America’s asexual model of reproduction with the more voluptuous French view, “All American What-to-Expect books begin with the Test, not the Act.” He goes on, “In Paris, [pregnancy] is something that has happened because of sex, which with help and counsel, can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York, pregnancy is a ward in the house of Medicine. In Paris, it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.”
Despite the pervasiveness of the American mind-set, there are plenty of women who mount daily insurrections against the denial of eros. For them, motherhood heralds newfound sexual confidence, womanliness, and even the restitution of a wounded body. One day, I had back-to-back sessions, first with Stephanie, then with Amber. The realities of their daily lives had an uncanny resemblance, but their experiences couldn’t have been farther apart. Amber told me, “I used to say no to sex as a matter of course. Who knows why? Denial of any desire, even hunger, was modeled for me by my 105-pound mother. Before I had kids, whenever my husband asked me if I wanted to eat, I also said no. I refused out of habit, before actually registering the question.
“Now I know far more profound reasons to say no to sex: the desperate fatigue of new motherhood; the seemingly bottomless rage at my two-and-a-half-year-old for waking up his sleeping infant brother; the bitterness of feeling unsupported, a workhorse for our home and children. And yet I am the one who feels hungry for sex, who demands it or mopes about not getting it. I give all day in very physical ways: nursing, cooking, stooping to pick up toys, carrying children, changing diapers. After a few days of peanut butter sandwiches and Wiggles CDs, when I am a participant in my children’s world to the exclusion of my own, I want my glass of sherry, my music, and my man. I long to be yanked out of the messy hair, spit-up-on shirt, mac-and-cheese-encrusted jeans that I think of as the ‘mother body.’ As often as I can, I put that body to bed with the kids.”
Another patient, Charlene, is being tutored by her children. “My kids have taught me how to be greedy. My fifteen-month-old can suck on me for half an hour, walk off to play, and be back for more within minutes. He shakes his head no when I offer him milk in a cup or bottle, pulls up my shirt, and squeals until I unsnap my bra for him. When he sees my nipple he smiles, coos, and dives in. The three-year-old wants my lap, my time, my attention as often as he can steal it from his brother. He will tell me how to position my body on the floor, exactly how I should push the truck, and feels no guilt or shame in declaring which parent he wants to play with or put him to bed. Of course they don’t always get what they want, but I am impressed by their fluid transmission of desire between body and mind. They let themselves feel in a way I’d forgotten, or been trained away from; and watching them makes me more aware of my own body and reminds me of my own desire.”
For Renee, pregnancy ushered in a self-acceptance she had never felt. “Pregnancy was a healing experience for me. I was sexually abused as a child, and had always loathed any signs of womanliness in my body. I’d been at war with my thighs for twenty-five years. I was hospitalized for an eating disorder the year before I got pregnant. In fact, I was so skinny I didn’t even think I could get pregnant. I hadn’t had a regular period in years. But the minute I saw that plus sign in the EPT everything changed. It was the first time in my life that food became decontaminated. I relished watching my body grow ripe. For once in my life my breasts were naturally round and I was so proud. Most of my friends complained of the discomfort and weight gain. But for me, I felt like it was finally OK to look like a woman. I gave birth naturally; it was powerful. I was amazed by what my body could do and what it could endure. I was capable of so much more than I thought. Ever since, when I make love, I pursue that intensity.”
For Julie, a mother of three, motherhood has brought a positive new identity. “In my early twenties I dressed like a boy: big sweaters, jeans, size-nine Keds. It was a total denial of femininity and a feminist distrust of its motives. I mistook appreciation for objectification, and didn’t trust that a man might be interested in me beyond my availability as a sexual object. These days the pants are stylish, tight, and fun; the blouses show cleavage. Finally, I’m the kind of woman my Italian father would recognize, and who would make my mother blush—greedy, sexy, entitled. Why? I feel safe now. I have no one’s eye to catch. I’m already caught, thoroughly enmeshed in the needs and desires of others (four males as it turns out). And I am finding freedom in this place, where there is no power game. I don’t have to respond to anyone I haven’t already chosen. As a mother I’m not afraid to be sexual, sensual, to assert my desire.”
When Daddy Sings the Baby Blues
For every man like Warren, who feels sexually abandoned when his wife becomes a mother, there is a man like Leo, whose libido makes a break for it on the way home from the delivery room. Dwindling desire in mothers is, in some ways, old news. We might not like it, but we can at least make sense of it. But what are we to make of the father who can no longer eroticize the mother of his children? This story, though just as common, is admitted far less frequently.
When Carla and Leo came to see me, she was at her wit’s end. They’d been together seventeen years: the first six a frenzy of the flesh, the next four the chaos of babyhood, the last seven a sexual desert. She went from talking to pleading to screaming to compensating. She had a number of flings and then a serious affair. He found out, she threatened divorce, he suggested therapy, and here they are.
She says, “I am so sick of the excuses. It’s his work, it’s the stress, it’s his dying father, he has to get up early, he hasn’t been to the gym and so he doesn’t have the energy, his back hurts, it’s my breath, it’s my weight, it’s his weight. I took it personally for so long, but now I’m done. I love this man, I’m prepared to stay, but I can’t live like this.”
He says, “I always considered myself to be very competent sexually. We kid around that we broke furniture when we first started dating; there was a lot of passion. I never looked at the kids as a defining moment in my life sexually, but obviously something switched somewhere deep inside.”
I learn that Leo had begun to withdraw physically when Carla became pregnant with their first son, and they had no sexual contact at all during the last trimester. Leo just came home later and later from work. Carla knew something was up, though they never discussed it openly.
“What changed for you when she became a mother?” I ask.
“Her significance,” he answers. “Her whole being turned from being my lover, my partner, and my wife to being the mother of my son. And then the mother of my other son. For a while they needed her completely, and that was really OK with me. I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world to have our babies sleeping next to us, for her to nurse them through the night. I wasn’t jealous at all. I’m a very loving, nurturing father myself.”
“What’s it like to suck the breast of a woman who’s been nursing a baby?” I ask him.
“It was weird,” he answered. “The whole physical thing was a little weird. I watched her give birth, twice, and I’ve got to say it was not so great for our sex life.”
“I know it’s supposed to be this magical moment, the miracle of life and all that, but no one seems to want to acknowledge the yuck factor,” I reassure him. “It’s not politically correct for a man to admit that watching his wife give birth can be gross. There’s a character in one of Alice Walker’s books, I think it’s Mr. Hal, who watches his partner give birth and is never able to touch her—or any other woman—for the rest of his life. He says he never wants to put someone through that again.”
“That’s a little extreme, but yeah. I became different with her, more cautious, not as free. I guess it stopped me from being aggressive or passionate or desiring her in that way—really giving myself to her, or taking her, when normally that’s how we were together. It was definitely a shift.”
“Couldn’t do that to the mother of your children?” I ask.
“Apparently not,” he answers.
“Let’s talk about this whole Madonna/whore business,” I continue. “It has deep psychological roots. A lot of men find it difficult to eroticize the mother of their children. It feels too regressive, too incestuous, too oedipal. What you need to remember is that she’s their mom, not yours. At this point, I recommend anything that can introduce a little healthy objectification. Anything that might distinguish her from ‘the mother.’”
Carla had been quiet for much of the session, but the following week I had no doubt she’d been paying attention. Laughing, she told me the story.
“I really wanted to let go with Leo. I wanted to give him an involved, prolonged, great blow job. Not just the compulsory head, not just the polite head. But I knew there was this thing with the wife, ‘the mother.’ Would he let me? So I initiated this game and said, ‘You know, we can have a couple of different kinds of sex and you can call it what you will, but if you want this blow job to continue it’s going to cost you.’ I said, ‘A hundred bucks if you want that kind of head. A hundred bucks.’ I thought the money would be fun, but I was really into seeing if Leo could de-role that mother. Well, you don’t pay the mother of your kids for a blow job, do you? You don’t pay your wife for a blow job. It was a lovely experiment, that’s all I’m going to say.”
“Maybe you could start taking credit cards. Keep a credit card machine by the bed,” Leo jokes.
Carla’s playful erotic intervention has stayed with me for years. In one gesture she cleverly captured and subverted the whole issue: how to retrieve the lover from the mother. Leo feared expressing the rawness of his desire to the mother of his children, a woman too worthy of love and respect. Carla took a risk, interrupted the pattern, and invited him into an erotic complicity. She uncloaked the repression and became a sexually provocative, slutty woman who demanded to be paid. In the midst of this explicitly staged endorsement of blatant sexuality, Leo’s lustfulness was finally unleashed.
Escaping the Siege of Family Life
Having a child is one of our grand aspirations. In a way we reproduce, be it biologically or through the other ways we create a family, so as not to die. We carve a place in the cycle of life and become inscribed in the course of history. We extend ourselves beyond mortality by leaving something, some one, behind: a representative of our union. In this way, having a child speaks of desire. It is a pure, life-affirming act. How cruel to see it erode the force that brought it into being.
There is no question that children make the erotic connection more difficult to sustain. There are the demands for routine without which family life cannot function, but which undermine sexual spontaneity. There is the undeniable stress on the couple’s resources: less time, money, and energy to spend on each other. There is the sexual invisibility of the American mother, which is so deeply rooted in our psyche that men and women alike conspire to deny maternal sexuality. There are the many ways we shut ourselves down sexually in the family, acting under the assumption that we need to keep sex hidden from children in order to protect them.
For many parents, the idea of a secret garden inspires everything from acute guilt and anxiety to the more benign gradations of embarrassment. We are afraid that our adult sexuality will somehow damage our kids, that it’s inappropriate or dangerous. But whom are we protecting? Children who see their primary caregivers at ease expressing their affection (discreetly, within appropriate boundaries) are more likely to embrace sexuality with the healthy combination of respect, responsibility, and curiosity it deserves. By censoring our sexuality, curbing our desires, or renouncing them altogether, we hand our inhibitions intact to the next generation.
There are so many reasons to give up on sex that those who don’t are champions in their own right. The brave and determined couples who maintain an erotic connection are, above all, the couples who value it. When they sense that desire is in crisis, they become industrious, and make intentional, diligent attempts to resuscitate it. They know that it is not children who extinguish the flame of desire; it is adults who fail to keep the spark alive.
