Let’s put this bluntly – having a baby is like watching Britney Spears shave her head with crazy eyes & then ram an umbrella into an SUV at a gas station. Remember how you felt? Helpless, humored, confused, & shocked with a massive dose of “WTF IS GOING ON HERE, PEOPLE?!?!”
yeah. That’s what happens when you have a baby. For us, Harrison was a bald umbrella-wielding Britney. (I’ll be sure to tell him that when he’s 18.)
I am now of the opinion that if you have a baby to “save your marriage,” you deserve ridicule & a discount to the closest divorce attorney in town. Sure, you’ll get warm fuzzies 90% of the time your husband holds that fresh little nugget. Those first few days in the hospital, hunkered down as a new wee family? Bliss. (p.s. to those that are knocked up, take my advice & soak it in. soak in the help & the hormone high & the absolute bliss that you feel. bottle it up, because you’ll need those memories to pull out in the dark stages to come) A baby brings animal ears on hoodies, sweet coos, & warm fuzzies. We all know this.
But a baby also brings sleep deprivation, mis-communication, higher demands of you spouse, & a plummeting sex drive.
I’m not a marriage expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a firm believer that there are two aspects to a marriage – the emotional & the physical. & both go hand-in-hand. If your emotional relationship goes wonky, your relationship in the bedroom suffers. & in return, lack of maritals leads to emotional dissent. Both pieces work together & both pieces are hammered resoundingly by that umbrella-wielding Britney known as “Baby.”
Two Known Facts:
1) Biologically, women shut down the baby-making factory to nurture the infant they have. We dry up like the Sahara, both physically & emotionally in regards to maritals. Everything in our hormones screams DO NOT GET KNOCKED UP AGAIN & I swear to God, if they still made iron chastity belts, I would have invested in one as soon as I delivered. & then made Tucker swallow the key.
b) Men don’t have this biological reaction. ’nuff said.
So it shouldn’t shock anyone that 6 weeks post-partum, my husband was wondering why my lacy thongs were still lying in my underwear drawer while sensible polka-dot granny panties adorned my butt cheeks. & that I had no urge to change this situation. (side note: does anyone else get squeamish about a rail-thin piece of fabric precariously close to where your OB performed a whip stitch only 12 weeks ago? like it could just slip past and OMG, you have a string creeping up your vag?! or am I the only one with a ridiculously over-active imagination? yes? okay, then.) Did we do the dirty the night of my check-up? Absolutely. Did it hurt? nah, not really.
So WHY is my lingerie drawer still untouched? Because it’s biological. Because it’s emotional. Because I am two sizes larger than I used to be & not yet comfortable in lace that barely covers 1/10th of my body.
& WHY did Nate start pulling out my lingerie, one-by-one, describing the memories he had of such outfits? Because he’s a 27-year-old man that loves sex. A man that loves me & thinks I still look hot in the bustier with fringe on the bottom that, in his mind, makes me sexier than Shakira. & a man that wanted me to know that on no uncertain terms is he dreading the return to my lingerie-wearing days.
What did I do in all my post-hormonal psychosis? I cried. Of course. Cried that I want to feel sexy. I want to wear lingerie. But I can’t fit into it yet. So please, honey…be patient. I’ll get there. I won’t be on Mommy Lock-Down forever. But sometimes in this stage of life, it is hard to fathom the act of sex, no matter how attractive & bang-worthy I find my husband. I try to remember that men & women are different. Let’s be frank – my husband isn’t a caveman, but let’s put all bull aside & admit that men are NOT as complex as we want them to be. Are they sensitive, emotional, & capable of incredible love? Absolutely. Are they as complex with a touch of the batshitcrazy as women? Personally, I don’t think so. As one of the gals that co-authored Baby Proofing Your Marriage (oh, what’s that? I’ve recommended that book ad nauseam? YEAH, I KNOW. BECAUSE IT IS AWESOME), “Men communicate with sex. Imagine your husband sitting across the table from you & not speaking to you for a month.” (okay, I paraphrased. but it’s late & i’m on like, glass 4 of merlot)
Yesterday, I came home to a new piece of lingerie, 2 sizes bigger. & proposed a plan to Nate:
Sex every day. For the next thirty days.
(inspired by this couple. if they did it for 101 days, surely we can hang for a mere 30 days!)
WHY?! you scream. WHY, Blair?! Do you have no sense of traumatized vagina? Do you not have enough crammed into your 24-hour-needing-48-hours day?! I do! I promise! But I also know that I need to get laid. Because it’s too easy to let sex become something I brush off thinking “tomorrow night!” and then “tomorrow night” again. and again. and again. Until it’s been 3 weeks since we last bumped uglies & I’m wondering why I’m finding Nate’s teeth-brushing routine to be annoying. Am I scheduling sex? Absolutely. But I’m probably having more sex than those that are want to criticize this act. WIN.
We’re viewing this as an experiment – can we make it 30 days? can we use this to spark the sex life we had prior to baby-making? can having more make me want more, therefore regaining my ol’ faithful sex drive? will nate faint from happiness two weeks in? can I finally convince him to let me seduce him in the back of his car on his lunch break?
& the more important question – can you purchase Trojans in bulk?
