Sex after baby: Getting busy ... or not
Dr. Ian Kerner and Heidi Raykeil on intimacy challenges new parents face verting a mid-life crisis 'down there'
Why does age slow him down? Can age cause shrinage? And is her man's British upbringing causing their too-polite exchanges in the bedroom? Sexploration answers your queries.
TODAY books
Jan. 27, 2009
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.