"Trust your instincts"

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "finding what works for you".

Trust yourself.

You know more than you think you do.... what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.

- Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1946

When it comes to natural human behaviours, like parenting, sex and relationships, we're often told to trust our gut. We are animals, after all, and animal instincts have been honed by evolution over millions of years. Other animals don't worry about how to raise their young, they just do it. They don't worry about what form their relationship should take, or write blogs about it, or read advice columns. They follow their instincts.

Parenting, as one of the most basic and essential behaviours in any species, should be instinctive, as Dr Spock wrote, but what I think he is missing is that we are not an instinctive species. Like other primates (more so than other primates) whilst evolving our capacity to learn, our basic instincts have been eroded and overwritten.

Harriet J. Smith is a clinical psychologist who adopted several tamarind monkeys when they were no longer needed for research. When they started to breed, she realised that the monkeys that she had raised herself had no idea what to do next. The parents didn't understand why they had these tiny, baby monkeys clinging to their backs and would try to bite them, or flick them away. The only adult monkey who showed an interest in caring for the babies was one that had been captured from the wild, and who wasn't even a parent. In other words, it wasn't enough for these monkeys to trust their innate instincts. Successful parenting has to be taught.

This explains why something as natural as breastfeeding feels so unnatural to most mothers when they try it, and also why at 6 months, only 1 in 4 babies are breastfed at all, only 1% are breastfed exclusively. Of all things, lactation should come easily to mammals, but we're not the only species that can struggle. Maki, a chimpanzee born in captivity, was unable to breastfeed her baby, despite the baby being able to latch on and feed when her mother was unconscious. A gorilla in a zoo, who hadn't managed to breastfeed her first child cracked it with her second, after the local La Lache league fed their babies in her sight during her pregnancy. When you consider how rare (and stigmatised) breastfeeding is, and how much rarer it is that we actually see it, it shouldn't be a surprise that human women struggle as well.

If something as natural and necessary to the survival of our species as caring and feeding our young doesn't actually come naturally, how can we expect our relationships to work if we just "follow our gut"?

Like these other primates, we don't know instinctively what is going to work and what isn't. What feels like trusting our instincts is really trusting what we've learnt from our environment and upbringing, and this can lead us into relationship models that just don't suit us. This is why monogamy is our romantic ideal - it isn't because monogamy is natural or best for us as a species, it's just because that's the model we see around us. It's the same reason why we feel that feeding a baby with a bottle is more natural than with a breast, or why transporting our babies in prams and buggies, rather than carrying them (like every other primate), feels like the right thing to do.

Smith turned her research into a book called Primate Parenting, where she attempts to take the parenting techniques of our closest relatives in the wild and use them to guide "civilised" humans. I don't believe that natural is always best, but I do think it's often a good starting place. As Smith explains in her book, there are good reasons why keeping in physical contact with our babies, breastfeeding them on demand, and sleeping with them close by, as other primates do, are both natural and desirable behaviours, and working from that point is a good way to figure out what works best for your individual relationship with your unique child. Unfortunately, what comes most naturally to human relationships is less easy to piece together, and anthropologists are far from a consensus. And while there are many similarities between the ways that primates parent, there are wild differences in how they organise their sex lives, making it far harder to extrapolate from them to us. (Our two closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, are almost polar opposites when it comes to sex and relationships.)

Finding what works for me has been a long process of picking this learning apart. When making predictions about what is going to work well for me, how much of my thinking comes from what I've inadvertently learnt from society, and how much of it comes from my own, rational thinking?

The only way for me to work it out has been to give it a go. I wouldn't have thought that I had the capacity to love more than one person at a time before meeting my boyfriend, and I would have assumed that I'd be tormented with jealousy if my husband had sex with someone else before he actually did it. These beliefs were so ingrained they needed to be demonstrated to be untrue for me to discard them. Similarly, I hated the idea of co-sleeping when I was pregnant, and insisted on having a moses basket by my bed. It became a laundry basket three days after Small was born, and she is still sleeping next to me nearly two years later. I'm not suggesting that polyamory and co-sleeping are going to work for you, but I do think some of these decisions have to be tested in the field before locking down your options. Especially if you're making plans for relationships before you've met the people you'll be having these relationships with (before they even exist if you're talking about parenting.)

I'm pretty sure, based on the available evidence, that monogamy isn't natural, but it's unlikely that the pair-bonding-based polyamory that I've settled myself into is natural either. So if we don't know what is natural or what is a "best-fit" for our species to use as a starting place, we have a lot more work to do in making these decisions. But also, I expect, a lot more freedom.

(N.B. I don't mean to come down quite so hard on Dr Spock. Despite my criticism of his basic argument, he really did challenge the rigid norms of parenting at the time, empowered parents, and was the catalyst for a lot of positive change.)

Jealousy and breasfeeding

I'm late to comment on Erica Jong's article in the New York Times, Is Sex Passé? but one thing jumped out at me: when listing all the various ways that women have supposedly given up sex for motherhood, she says that if you 'breast-feed at all hours' then your partner 'knows your breasts don’t belong to him.'

Well of course he knows that, I thought. He doesn't need me to breastfeed to know that my breasts, like the rest of my body, belongs to nobody but me. Is this real? Do people really think like this? When we're in a committed relationship, do our partners 'own' our bodies?

To some people, it seems so. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Beliefnet goes so far as to compare breastfeeding to adultery, as the mother 'gives her breasts to her son and takes them away from her husband'. So only one person can use your breasts at once, and if the baby gets them, Dad will just have to go without.

This is partly a problem with the oversexualisation of breasts (as I blogged about before) but I think some of this comes from an over-enthusiastic application of monogamy: for some, sexual exclusivity translates into ownership.

When I ran this idea past my husband, he was genuinely baffled. The idea that my breasts ever 'belonged' to him, as Jong said, or that he might be jealous of our child's access to my breasts was something that hadn't crossed his mind. Of course, seeing as he doesn't ask for exclusive access to any part of my sexuality, it's hardly surprising that non-sexual contact with my body doesn't bother him. But I hope that you don't need to be polyamorous to have a problem with this level of entitlement. Surely you can be monogamous without expecting your partner to actually belong to you?

Ultimately, I don't think this is a problem with monogamy, but I can see that perhaps a more open-minded attitude to relationship structures might help. When, like Jong and Boteach, your monogamous principles are challenged by the normal, healthy act of breastfeeding, it probably isn't the breastfeeding that's causing the problem. If people had a broader view of the different kinds of ways in which we can love, perhaps they'd be able to choose monogamy without feeling conflicted when they use their breasts to care for their child. (And as we're so far away from the WHO's goal of exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months, and continued breastfeeding until at least 2 years, we need all the help we can get.) Then, maybe, we'd be able to ditch the old-fashioned notion that sexuality and motherhood are somehow antithetical.

'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.

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.

Breasts

When we discussed breastfeeding in our antenatal classes, we were told that although breastfeeding is perfectly natural, it may take us a little while before we are confident enough to feed our babies in public.  For obvious reasons, it takes a bit of a mental adjustment to think of whapping out one of your tits in Costa Coffee as acceptable behaviour. 

It will surprise no one who knows me well that I made this adjustment very quickly, but then, those who know me well know that nudity is a common side-effect at many of my social gatherings. 

Of course, there is a big difference between getting your boobs out for an orgy, and getting your boobs out to feed your newborn daughter, but even so, I think the orgies made the transition far easier for me.

I began breastfeeding our daughter about 5 minutes after her birth (as soon as she stopped screaming, pretty much).  At this point, with my legs in stirrups, waiting for someone to stitch me up, the relevant area pointing at the door (oh, the glamour of birth), showing a boob to the hospital staff was small potatoes.  Since then, however, I have breastfed her in cafes and pubs, in Sainsbury's, on benches in the middle of the highstreet and last week, in a shoeshop. I would not have been comfortable casually showing my nipples to strangers on the street pre-baby, but I am now.

People who don't have sex with piles of their friends at once (SUCKS TO BE THEM) might be surprised to know that the nudity at our parties is frequently non-sexual. Despite the very open appreciation of people's bodies, hanging out with your top off, or even totally naked, at a sex party is often just relaxed socialising.

I think that having lots of people fondle my breasts at once has, therefore, paradoxically, made me more ready to see my breasts as non-sexual. Not that they aren't still sexy, just that they now have dual purpose. Like a nice pair of legs can be devastatingly sexy, but still useful for walking around and fine to display in public.

But speaking of legs: can you imagine if you had legs your whole life, and your lovers told you how gorgeous they were, and wanted to touch them, but you never used them to walk or run? Finding out that this beautiful part of your body could also be incredibly useful would only enhance your enjoyment of them, surely? The fact that my daughter is not only nourished by my boobs, but is growing and thriving because of what they can do has made me like them more. I'll probably get tired of the leaking and the night-time engorgement eventually, but for now, I'm appreciating my body more than ever, for what it can do, rather than what other people might think of it. And flashing the general public, too.

First time together.

I don't think I'll blog about the birth. Unless anyone particularly wants to know? Jemmy was one of the first people I called when it was over, anyway. Those first few hours with her on the outside were magical, and I wanted to share some of it with him.

The hospital was very close to his house, so we had imagined that he would visit me there, but as it turns out, I didn't stay long enough for any visits at all. So, I think Small was three days old when Jemmy came over to our place to meet her. It was the day my milk "came in", so my breasts were like sacks of sand. He had offered to cook us dinner (he is awesome like that) which was appreciated beyond measure. This was my daughter's first day experiencing milk, and it was a hit, so whenever she was awake, she wanted to suck. Add to that that it was also her stomach's first day digesting more than a teaspoon of liquid at a time, and there was also a lot of mess. It was more than enough work for two people without thinking of cooking, let alone two people who had barely slept for four or five days, one of whom could barely walk due to stitches.

The things that will stay with me were that he cried when he held her, and he made us a salad with pears in it.

He also made a risotto, which was perfect as I could eat it with one hand as I fed her yet again. Breastfeeding made me incredibly hungry in the early weeks, and I was still replacing lost calories from labour, so I ate twice as much as either of them. And stuff sentmental wank, it was one of the best meals I've ever had.

Spending time with both of them together recharged me in a way I didn't predict. I'm very close to our family, but I can relax a different part of myself when I'm with Jemmy. Experiencing that whilst adjusting to being a parent turned out to be just what I needed.

It was, of course, different. One of the things about having a long term relationship with someone you do not live with, is that sex stays a big feature. When Jemmy and I plan time together, we assume sex will happen. Because we live together, Gaius and I spend a larger proportion of our time together not having sex. This is one reason, I think, that secondary poly relationships can feel slightly unreal, because the ordinary, every day stuff just doesn't feature, at least, not to the same extent.

So all this means that not having sex with Gaius feels less significant than not having sex with Jemmy, because I am more used to not having sex with Gaius. Maybe, also, because new parents expect a temporary cessation of their sex lives, but people (obviously) don't often talk about how your other sexual relationships might change.

I did not think I would be noticing the absense of sex three days after pushing a human being out of my vagina, but there you go.