SEX ISN'T ALWAYS THE SAME ONCE YOU'RE A PARENT

- SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER

Saying goes, if newlyweds drop a dime into a jar every time they have sex during the first year of marriage, and take one out for every sexual encounter thereafter, the dime supply will hold up fine. Think about that: more sex in twelve months than during all the years that follow in a typical lifetime union. True, it's just a saying—but for many of us married folks, it strikes close enough to home to cause concern. For those of us raising small children, or just about to, sayings like these heighten the panic that already plagues us regarding our slumping sex lives.

And for good reason. As a writer, I subscribe to twenty-three publications, including several specifically for women, parents, or both. Every week my mailbox bursts with articles about sex—how to have it, how to have it like you want it, and how to want to have it at all. This advice is not just for old, tired, married moms. Much of it is aimed at single, childless women, in committed relationships or still searching—women who are, thanks to Hollywood, enjoying what many of us secretly believe to be the most sexually exciting time of life.

If these women are worried about desire, what does that mean for those of us who are rising every hour all night long to nurse a baby, worrying about things like stump care and stretch marks, perineal tears and episiotomy stitches, sore nipples and C-sections, colic and cradle cap? If even single people who have the thrill of novelty and courtship on their side are too overworked, stressed out, and detached to feel desire, then where can that possibly leave those of us who are catapulting back and forth between the outer world and the mysterious, enclosed environment of a newborn human being totally dependent on us for its very survival? All this, while still juggling either the same career demands and uncertainty as the rest of the planet, or the financial panic of a single income—or both, when even two incomes don't stretch far enough to cover the costs of family life and day care?

I have always considered a vital sex life essential to a healthy marriage. Sex is the aspect of romantic, monogamous partnership that sets it apart from all other relationships. Sex moves two people beyond friendship into a plane that surpasses the ordinary and allows for nurturing on a physical, emotional, and even spiritual level. Based on that belief, I used to be naively judgmental of other couples who admitted to a slowdown in lovemaking. Once, very early in our marriage, my husband and I attended a party at which I found myself getting acquainted with the wives of his friends, most of whom had been married about five years. As I listened to those women joke about their lack of interest in sex, all I could think of was how I would never let that happen to me, and my marriage. In one quick swoop I plopped those couples into a category of passionless, dried-up has-beens, and simultaneously patted myself on the back for being better than that.

After all, I had recently read study results linking frequent sex with marital happiness. We began tracking our love life by marking the calendar with smiley faces every time we had sex. Back then, our most significant difference, sexually speaking, was whether or not making love two or three times in a row counted as one sexual experience or several. Goal oriented and tough-minded, I said one.

So resolved was I to preserve passion in my marriage that I confused duty—not to a man, but to an ideal—with desire, and failed to see the important distinction between having a lot of sex because I thought we should, and having as much sex as we wanted because we truly wanted. Put simply, I was bound and determined that my partner and I would remain madly in love through the years, and express that love in bed with the same intensity and frequency as we did in the blissful beginning.

I think I was right about the importance of passion and sexual expression: it was striving to keep it the same that tripped me up. But it took me a while to realize that. It's easy to say, in retrospect, that when I went for my six-week check up after the birth of our first child, and I was petrified to the point of sweat and dizziness at the idea of anyone inserting anything into my vagina, that knowing I wasn't quite ready for sex should have been easy. After a mediolateral episiotomy that left my entire backside too bruised to sit down for the first two weeks, it should, perhaps, have been obvious to me that although our culture and western medicine agree on about six weeks postpartum as a safe and reasonable juncture to resume intercourse, I needed somewhat longer to heal. If nothing else, it's hard to accept that when, in spite of these warning signs, my husband and I resumed intercourse right on schedule, I did not heed my body's painful messages to stop.

Not until two years later, after the birth of our second child, did I begin to reexamine my stubborn notions about the way sex and intimacy work together in marriage. Fortunately, two years of mothering my little girl had taken me too far down previously avoided roads of self-discovery to turn back. I exchanged my cocky sense of knowing it all for a more honest and hard-won self-assurance that acknowledged the part of me that remained unsure, as well. Things I previously heard and dismissed as other women's problems began to echo in my brain, such as the married friend, mother of one baby, who said of her husband: "He asks, 'Can we have sex tonight?' as if it's going to just happen like that. I say no—if he wants it, he can make me want it, too, rather than simply asking for it."

Or the friends who visited us several weeks after my son's birth, who were at the time parents of a two-year-old, and expecting another baby soon. After comparing notes, we agreed that entering parenthood had not entailed the strain and detriment to our relationships we had worried it might—yet. By extension, we believed, a second child should pose no great disaster. Until, with thoughtfully knitted brows, our male friend said to his wife, "But wait a minute. You hated me for almost a whole year after we had the first one." Although my second birth experience was easier than my first, without drugs or stitches, I was overwhelmed by the need for physical space and time to heal and grow back into myself—as a mother again, as a woman, and eventually as a sexual being. For me, healing meant abstinence; the length of postnatal sex taboos in other cultures, such as three years—the time of weaning—for the American Sioux Society, began to sound pretty good. It was confusing for both my husband and me to face what felt like a sexual crisis now, after our second child, when we figured we should already be over the adjustment-to-parenthood hump.

I found myself in a panic about the whole notion of sex, and what it meant for my husband and me to indulge my need for abstinence. Would our marriage be forever damaged, ruined even?

My husband was confused and hurt by what he had to fight against experiencing as complete rejection, but he believed me when I insisted I wanted nothing more than to return to a passionate sex life together; first, though, I needed time to figure out why I was out of sync sexually. He managed to do the most loving thing of all: reassure me he loved me no matter what, and insist that pregnancy and birth were reasons enough for my body to need a rest.

Memories of our four years together—the great and the regretful—flooded my mind. I was even swept away by flashbacks to adolescence and my initiation into a sexual culture—everything from the tenderness of holding hands in sixth grade to the rude sexual slurs of junior high and the disturbingly fresh wounds left later by touching—sexual and otherwise—that I didn't always really want or understand, but endured for reasons as complicated as our culture itself and as simple as not knowing how to say no. Choosing not to be sexual in the present somehow made up for the times in my life when I felt no, consciously or not, but said yes—and this empowered me to reclaim my sexuality all over again, with the wisdom and strength of a woman and mother. And when you're ready for what you need, you find it, wherever you are. Which for me, happened to be in the book section of a favorite store, looking for I don't know exactly what. I came across a little blue paperback called, "Tantra:The Art of Conscious Loving©", by Charles and Caroline Muir. When I opened it and read, "This book is dedicated to the Spirit of the Mother," I was sold. According to the Muirs, Tantra refers specifically to a series of ancient Hindu books which describe sexual disciplines and meditations intended to raise lovemaking to the level of spirituality and art. These 2,000-year-old tenets struck this twentieth-century mom as the most respectful and gentle, yet exciting and erotic approach to sex and physical intimacy I have seen yet, despite my twenty-three subscriptions. Later that night, my husband and I cozied under the covers and read all about the sex we still weren't having much of, even several months after our son's birth.

We learned quickly that we didn't know as much about sex as we thought we did. We had neglected to fully understand and honor the innate differences between women and men, the yin and yang of the thing. Especially the yin: as the nursing mother of an infant and a toddler, I was in desperate need of some nurturing myself. According to Tantra, so are we all. Gifts of love, nurturing touch, and a commitment to the relationship that exceeds all other commitments create and nourish a healthy sexual energy between beloveds.

Although my husband was initially most interested in getting to the part where we practice new positions, techniques, and dances of love—I guess that's the yang—he was soon as immersed as I was in relearning how to be sensual. Babies are born that way, but somewhere along the line we become more or less detached from the gritty and erotic world of sensation as we run the race of our often too-pressured lives.

We decided to make our sex life a priority, beginning by opening our minds and bodies to new concepts. I'm talking about lots of things you've heard a million times before, like oil-rubbed massages, gentle foot rubs, stroking your partners hair, savoring a sensual food like chocolate or ice cream together, long, long open mouthed kisses, and lying naked together, holding each other in a completely comfortable position, and breathing slowly and deliberately at the same time.

What I'm not talking about is doing these things as foreplay, which is often no more than an obligatory prelude to sex. I'm talking about engaging in these loving rituals very often—daily if you can, but weekly as a bare minimum - just on their own, to increase your appreciation of your partner, and your sexual tension at the same time.

The most wonderful part of our new love life is that it can be this slow, this relaxed, this calm. Because the reality is that we have two children, two amazing little souls whose needs we are dedicated to meeting, which at times requires delaying our own, especially during these early years. There isn't nearly enough time for all the romantic walks through fall leaves, long, hot soaks or—let's face it—even hugs and kisses as we'd like. We're more rushed than we want to be most of the time, and more tired than we can believe all of the time.

When our first child was born, I responded to the challenge by maintaining our sexual status quo. Which led to our second child; after he arrived, I responded with what felt like a sexual freeze. But it wasn't, because all the while I was yearning for a change, a deepening, an unfurling of desire as I have only begun to fully know it.

Our sex life isn't the same as it was before we became parents, and I don't predict it ever will be—too much has changed. We know each other infinitely better; we're a thousand times more honest. I've never felt so vulnerable, not ever. Yet, together, we've never been more secure. We may not have sex as often we once did, but we touch each other more often, more sincerely and more deeply than we ever have. We set aside this year, anniversary to anniversary, to relive our courtship, except rewriting it to be what we'd want for ourselves, now. It's an adventure, and a romantic part of what we call our "sexual revolution."

Meanwhile, three of our neighbors conceived their second children close on the heels of their firstborns, and all of them referred not-so-jokingly to the reality of immaculate conception. ("Believe me, we really can't figure out how this happened," accompanied by looks of sincere bewilderment.) My own experiences and those of people close to me, parents and childless couples alike, have gotten me thinking that all those articles about sex and passion and keeping it alive were written for a reason: It's not always easy. And it shouldn't be. If it weren't for sexual crises like the one I encountered after my son's birth, we would never seek the catalysts that motivate us to transform our understanding of ourselves and our relationships. Without ebb and flow and occasional flood and drought of sexual energies, we would lack the tension and the trauma to reach unprecedented levels of intimacy and ecstasy with the ones we love. I, for one, wouldn't trade it. MP