'Motherbaby'

Rachel Cusk, in her unflinching book about motherhood, A Life's Work, describes the new mother and her infant as 'a composite creature, best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby.' 'I feel like a house,' she writes, 'to which an extension has been added.'

In the nine months she spent in my womb, my baby grew from a single celled life-form into a human being. Until birth, she did even need to breathe or eat, as my body did everything or her. She emerged still attached to me, needing to be physically severed by her father with repeated attempts using a pair of medical scissors. It was as she resisted our separation. And although the cord was cut, this did not mark her separation from me, just the beginning of it.

After birth, my womb felt huge and empty, leaving me with a hollow sensation that made me all the more aware that the symbiosis of pregnancy was over. Now, when she sucked at me, my stomach cramped around her absence, shrinking back to what it was before, when I was a single person. But I wasn't that single person then, and I'm still not.

I sometimes imagined that separated existence pained her, and periodically, she needed to be brought to back to me and plugged in, not just for food, but to recharge our connection. We never knew how long a gap was acceptable between these dockings: sometimes enough for a bath or shower, sometimes (thrillingly) enough for me attempt something as risky as leaving the house without her. Because although her father had an enormous arsenal of tricks that calmed and delighted her, there was one thing only I could do, and it never seemed far from her mind. Gradually, she accepted longer and longer periods of time without me, and then finally, started to shift from parasitically relying on me for nutrition to eating solid food.

Now, at more than half a year since her birth, the separation of motherbaby into just parent and child feels like a plausible future. This separation is something that I both long for and dread. I still ache for her when we are apart, though the ache takes longer and longer each time before it bothers me.

Our relationship is like a love affair in reverse. We began with our lives impossibly tangled together, and now we are gradually growing apart. She spends less and less time in my arms, and one day, she'll leave me.

For Jemmy, the more that Small and I grow apart, the more of me he can have back. Parenting is not something we share as it is with my husband, and so this early intensity has pushed us apart, despite his importance to my family. But for her father, this story is very different. When he cut the cord, that was the beginning of his ability to parent without me. During pregnancy and early infancy, taking care of his child often meant taking care of me. Just as I am feeling her ripping away from me, I am also needed less and less as an intermediary in their relationship.

And ultimately, this was the plan all along - not an extension to myself, but a child that we can raise as a family.

The Confirmation, by Edwin Muir

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face,
I in my mind had waited for this long.
Seeing the false and searching the true,
Then I found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads.
But you, what shall I call you?
A fountain in a waste.
A well of water in a country dry.
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright.
Your open heart simple with giving, give the primal deed.
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed.
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Breastfeeding

I was not prepared for how much I would enjoy breastfeeding. Leaving aside the health benefits of breastfeeding (or the health risks of not breastfeeding, depending on how you'd rather phrase it), it is about far more than food: it makes her sleepy, soothes her, comforts her and distracts her when she is bored. It is the lazy mother's best parenting tool.

From the first time that my daughter ejected the nipple from her lips with an audible "pop" and collapsed onto my bosom, nipple pressed against her cheek, wrapping her tiny arms around my breast and falling peacefully and beautifully asleep, I was utterly sold.

But, oh sweet Jesus, is breastfeeding ever a bind. Neither Gaius or I believed that parenting tasks should be doled out according to the vagaries of gender, and he passionately rejects the restrictive notion that a father's job should revolve around "breadwinning". We were emphatically committed to sharing the duties of parenting. But this is something that we cannot share. It does not matter how much of a feminist you are, how committed you are to equal parenting, how dismissive you are of gender roles: if one of you is breastfeeding, your sex will result in you being utterly tied to that child in a way that no one else can share. You can fight the patriarchy, but you cannot fight biology: biology is not concerned with equal rights.

Yes, I could express milk so someone else can give it to her in a bottle, but expressing milk takes longer than actually feeding her; then you've got to wash and sterilise the pump and the bottles, and then you've really got to pump when you would have fed her anyway to make sure your body keeps producing the right amount of milk. And yes, we could give her the occasional bottle of formula milk, but not only is there a good chance that she will refuse it (it just doesn't taste as nice), but that really would be putting my desire for freedom above her health, as it could endanger her virgin gut. The path of least resistance in this case is just to go with the flow and end up, as in our case, with one parent staying at home with the baby, and the other going out to work. Oh how are the mighty rejecters-of-traditional-gender-roles fallen.

For the first few months of her life, it felt like she was on elastic - I'd pass her over to someone else, but it was usually only a matter of minutes before she would ping back to my nipple once more.

I have cried because I couldn't get a moment to myself. I have fantasised about a measly four hours of uninterupted sleep. And from a polyamorous point of view, I have resigned myself to not being able to leave my baby for more than a few hours at a time, day or night, for a long time yet. This does not make my relationship with Jemmy easy.

Gaius, on the other hand, is able to be far more flexible. He can sleep with his other lovers in our spare room. He can go out on dates in his evenings. He has even spent one or two nights away from us! Amazing! All of this is rare, and completely with my blessing, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn't intensely jealous - not for the time he spends with other women, but for the time he spends without Small.

We had a New Year's Eve party this year. At about 2am, I left the drinking and the laughter of some of our dearest friends downstairs, and crawled into bed next to my daughter. I pulled her close and helped her to latch on. I nestled my nose into her warm hair and wrapped my arm around her, listening to her grateful swallows. And then, when she had finished and fallen into a deep, satiated sleep, I didn't immediately return to the party; I stayed to feel her warm face pressed against my skin, to listen to her soft breathing and smell her warm, milky breath. Jealous as I am of my husband's freedom, I know he would swap with me in a heartbeat.

We don't say it often, but we both know that biology has given me the better deal.

P.S. If you or someone you know is struggling with breastfeeding, please encourage them to get help. Don't rely on support and advice that isn't working. Good places to start are the NCT and La Leche League. Breastfeeding can be hard, but it is so, so worth it.

Postnatal Polyamory and Sex, Part I

There is an awful lot written out there about what to expect from your sex life after childbirth, and an awful lot of it didn't apply to me.

For one, "sex" in this context nearly always means vaginal penetration with a penis, and it is equally as frequently is limited to "between the baby's parents". There is also an assumption that physical healing and sexual desire will neatly match together. And as none of that applied to my sex life as a whole, I'm going to try writing something that does.

My husband and I began to talk about how much we missed sex within a few days of Small's birth. I think it was more of an urge to reconnect other after such a tumultuous change than it was sexual desire, but it was still reassuring to me to know that the hormones hadn't caused fatal damage to my libido. (The hormone shift from being pregnant to not being pregnant is dramatic, and made me tearful for a few days.)

Physically, however, I just couldn't, and I'm not just talking penetration. It took nearly three weeks before I was able to properly inspect my frightened genitalia, and that ended with a trip to my GP to weepily ask if it was "normal". It took four weeks for the bleeding (lochia) to stop, and that, combined with hot flashes, leaking (sometimes squirting) nipples, smelling slightly of cheese, wee and babysick, and sweating like a runner, meant that I just felt gross and chronically unsexy. I wanted a sex life, I just couldn't do it.

Which all makes it very strange when the advice about resuming sex after childbirth is all about the vagina. Putting anything inside my vagina was the last thing on my mind, but sex? I still wanted that. I think I involved my vagina in sex three or four times in the first six months. (And six months is also, roughly, when it felt like it had returned to normal function, and any lingering effects from birth finally faded.)

And then there is polyamory. In the early weeks and months of Small's life, being polyamorous meant that there were two men that I wasn't having sex with.

It was different with them both. I touched on this before when discussing how different co-habitating can feel from having lovers who live elsewhere. But there is more to it, as Gaius and I are no longer merely cohabiting, we are now co-parenting. This bond has given our relationship a new focus, intimacy and importance that only makes the contrast between what we have and what we have with our other lovers sharper.

The result of this is that it took me a little while before I felt comfortable being sexual again with Jemmy (well, it was a couple of months, but that felt like a long time), and longer still before I could do anything with anyone else. To be honest, I'm still not quite "there".

From talking to other new mothers, I know that the drop in my libido is completely normal, but for me, it has amounted to not being as interested in sex with people outside of my two main relationships. This is not something I've ever seen discussed on Mumsnet.

A great deal of this is practical. When does sex actually happen? It can be difficult to find time for sex when you are breastfeeding a baby, and when you do find that time, sleep can be a far more attractive option. Exhaustion is a very effective libido-dampener. Especially if you know you can't just "catch up" on sleep the next day, (or the day after that, or the day after that...) When you don't live with your lover, there's a good chance that you won't be together when an appropriate window for sex pops up.

But that's probably not a sex-problem that would get me much sympathy in the normal world, is it?

Sex and pregnancy - part 2

Early pregnancy really knocked my libido. As you can probably imagine, the nausea and exhaustion did not make having sex easy or desirable. The very sensitive gag reflex didn't help either. Towards the end of the first trimester, I managed to control the symptoms with extra sleep and peanut butter sandwiches, and then, the awfulness just faded.

In late January, the three of us hosted what we were pretty sure was going to be our last house-orgy for a while. I was more than 5 months pregnant, so right in the middle of pregnancy: the sickness was just a memory, I no longer needed afternoon naps and early nights, and I finally actually looked pregnant, as opposed to just waistless.   I felt great, my friends were openly appreciative and interested in my changing body, and I suppose I felt special.

Late pregnancy is different. Like a Weebl in reverse, once lying down, I was down for good. Moving around the bed was hard work. Even cuddling required creative problem solving. Plus, starting from around the middle of pregnancy, penetrative sex felt less and less good, until I just gave up on it entirely. I wasn't expecting that.

Putting my other post on sex and pregnancy together with this gives a balanced perspective on my experiences: it was awesome and it was terrible, but in new and unusual ways.