Sex… After Children

Before you have kids, you take sex for granted. The ability to drop what you’re doing in the evening, strip each other’s clothes off and go at it on the living room floor. Waking up in the morning, cuddling in bed for hours, making love off and on throughout the morning, no worries about getting up, showering, getting the kids fed…

Of all the things in life that people warn you will change after you have kids, they don’t often remember to say that your sex life will be altered, that you will be forced to be more creative than you ever had to be prior to having children.

You’ll be limited to those somethings by all-too-short naptimes during the day, those nights when the kids actually go to bed on time, and stay in bed, or those even rarer occasions when you can get a babysitter and can get a hotel room. Your language changes. Your dirty talk may have fewer foul words, be less naughty, and more, “Oh yeah, baby, spank my bum. But go quickly, because I’m exhausted.” You have to learn creative ways to lock your door so that you don’t get those unfortunate interruptions of a curious child out to find out what mommy and daddy are up to.

One very valuable lesson to learn is that sleeping children are often only hard sleepers when you want them to wake up, and very light sleepers when you want them to stay asleep.

My husband and I decided to take advantage of that rare situation, that incredible opportunity where both of our kids were taking their daytime nap AT THE SAME TIME. I sneaked into the bedroom where my graveyard-working husband was sleeping, woke him up, and we got our grove going.

The kids were asleep, so there’s no worry about the volume level, right? The kids were asleep in the living room, down the hall, and the TV was on, there was no way they could hear us!

Twenty minutes later, I’m dressed again, I’m fixing my hair, and I step out of the bedroom, and my 4-year-old is standing at the end of the hall, looking at me, with a very concerned look on his face. His little brother is sitting just behind him, also looking at me.

“Mom, was Daddy hurting you?” he asked.

So much for them not hearing us. “No honey, Daddy wasn’t hurting me.”

“Oh.” He paused a second. “Well, then… were you hurting Daddy?”

“No honey, I wasn’t hurting Daddy.”

“Oh.” Another pause. “What were you doing?”

Awesome. What do you answer there? Wrestling? Next time they hear mommy and daddy “wrestle”, they’d want to join us. That doesn’t work.

“Mommy and Daddy were cleaning, honey.” Kids hate cleaning, that should do it.

“Cleaning? Why were you being so noisy?”

“We were cleaning very hard, honey. Lots of heavy lifting.”

“Oooooh.” And he wandered off to watch his cartoons.

It’s a lucky day that they accept such simple explanations.

Say that you, like myself, collect sex toys, and have your collection stashed in your room. Small children aren’t deterred by that subtle shoebox under your bed. You may find yourself, one day, cleaning your house, and notice that your youngest has disappeared. You follow the sound of toddler babble to find him on your bedroom floor, the shoe box open in front of him, with a vibrator in one hand, and a dildo in the other. All you can do is shove everything back in the box to hide on top of your closet, and pray that they don’t remember this in the long run and send you their therapy bill when they get older.

Whether you’re a collector or not, even just one vibrator could be discovered and innocently turned into a chew toy or a magic wand, or even a sword. You definitely learn more secure ways to stash your toys.

It is possible to be sexually active, and even a little crazy, and have kids at the same time. It just takes a little more creativity, patience, and determination than it used to.

Mojo Mama (@MojoMamaBlog) is a mother, blogger and sex toy-reviewer. She will be contributing to Sex and the 405 on the subject of sex after kids.