Metamours and family

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 will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "relationships with metamours"

I've written on this topic before. Since writing that post nearly two years ago about my fear of extending our nuclear family with the meta connections of polyamory, most of those connections have collapsed. Back then, I was concerned about the effect on Small, but she is fine. This time, I'm more selfishly thinking of myself. (I can do that sometimes, right?)

Although that post was about 'chosen family', I didn't choose any of my metamours - my partners did. With only trivial exceptions, I've always been delighted by their choices. Despite some bad past experiences, metamours, semi-metamours (metafuckbuddies?) and potential metamours are still one of my favourite things about poly. I want my partners to keep dating, because I want to meet their dates! If they find someone they want to be around, the chances are that I'll want their company too. Everyone wins!

But I'm not a part of their relationships, and I don't get a vote in how they are conducted, or how long they last. They are relationships of choice, but not mine.

That's not to say that metamours can't become friends or even family in their own right, but I suspect it happens less often than we hope. When the supporting meta-ness of the relationship has gone, there will at least be change, and what comes out the other side won't be like the metamour relationship you started with. If there are sides to be taken, the chances are you won't be on theirs any more. People that I once felt intimately close to have ended up feeling like near strangers, and none of it was in my control.

The relationship between metamours and the way that this builds poly networks or 'polycules', is seductive. It is so tempting to call these connections family far far earlier than the connections deserve. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one to fall into this trap. Most of the time, these connections feel stronger than they are. One crucial difference between biological family and chosen family is, I think, that one is opt-out, and the other is opt-in. To put it another way, you don't need a reason to include your parents or siblings in your family, but if you cut one or more of them out, you probably had a damn good reason for doing so. Relationships that started for a reason, on the other hand, are more vulnerable to change. These relationships of choice can be stronger, but the former is more plastic. The bonds between metamours can appear deceptively like family relationships (because you didn't choose them), but like your sister's partner or your uncle's new spouse, they are as brittle as romantic relationships themselves.

This is not to say that we don't believe in the 'poly tribe' any more, or that we don't think that metamours can become family. We do. We're just more cautious about whom we include. Marge Piercy's vicious poem A Snarl For Loose Friends ends with the lines 'Don't count your friends by their buttons until you have seen them pushed a few times' and I think that's good advice for anyone you want to rely on. My relationships with my partners and their meta-relationship with each other have all seen multiple buttons pushed, and we're still standing. Our relationships have been proven strong, and so we feel safe to call each other family.

Poly people talk about communication a lot. But we've learned from past experiences, and now we trust the results of this button-pushing more than what is said. That's not just because they may be unreliable, but because sadly, relationships don't succeed just because we want them to.

Small is old enough now to talk about her long term memories. She talks about my boyfriend when he isn't here, as she does with the rest of her family. When she was with my husband's girlfriend this weekend, she asked about a trip they took last Autumn, several visits ago. If someone has stuck around, through thick and thin, even when things got hard, then they'll be around long enough for her to develop a real connection with them.

Me? I'm cautious, but still hopeful. I've seen it fail, but I've seen it work, and I'm trying to learn from that. The two men in my life have loved each other as well as me for years now. No matter what else we might have got wrong, this bit we've got spectacularly right.

Won't polyamory harm your children?

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 will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "misconceptions and judgements"

Very little gets to me as much as the insinuation that I'm a bad or negligent parent. Here's an example: Dr Karen Ruskin (a "Marriage and Family Therapist") writes from an empassioned and entirely speculative position about the perceived risks to children of a polyamorous household. Chief of these is the risk that a breakup of one of the parent's relationships will cause lasting and serious emotional damage. Here are some choice snippets:

As children age and these significant adult figures in their life come and go (due to adult break ups with one’s polyamorous partner/partners), children don’t feel so loved, they no longer feel stable nor at peace. What do they feel? They feel abandoned! They feel rejected! Children who feel abandoned and rejected are emotionally wounded, hurt, and in turn feel unworthy of love...

Love pulled out from under the rug, any day any time is not a healthy way for a child to live. Thus, when their parent argues with one of their lovers, the child may fear the end is near, never knowing when this person they love and loves them will no longer exist in their life.

Read that extract again, but this time, imagine that it was written about single parents. Would Dr Ruskin advise single parents (whether parenting alone, or co-parenting whilst single) to just avoid dating entirely, and stay entirely single until their kids move out, in case their child developed an attachment to a partner that didn't work out? Of course not. I can imagine that she might advise caution, which is sensible. But would she warn them that their children might "become hardened and not open to love"? That dating and ending a relationship might cause their children to "wonder if they too someday will be dumped and that they are disposable too"?

If single parents aren't being subjected to this level of scaremongering about the damage they are causing their children, it's either because people think that being single is so awful that it's worth harming your children to avoid (problematic) or it's because children love their parents' partners more deeply when there is the possibility of several of them (nonsensical). Or maybe, just maybe, it's just because it hasn't been properly thought through.

This makes it one of those "polyamory is not that special" situations, because parents who date is not that new. Which is useful, because it means when I was concerned with much of the same things that Dr Karen froths at the mouth about, I actually had real lives and real parents to compare myself to. They weren't polyamorous (as far as I knew) but they were doing pretty much the same thing that I was.

To tackle the other side of dating, we were once told that we were raising our daughter in a "sexualised" environment. That one was pretty unpleasant. And here is the thing: most children grow up in houses where sex happens. Whether your parents were monogamously married, living separately, single or dating, parents have sex, they probably had some sex. It is not unusual. For the most part, children move seamlessly from being totally unaware of their parents' sex lives, to cheerfully pretending they know nothing about it. And then they move out. We don't anticipate our family being any different.

Which is another way of saying, again, that when it comes to parenting, we're not that different. I can understand the curiosity, and in the interest of combating misconceptions I'm happy to answer questions. But please, hold back on the "what about the children?" bullshit, because there is nothing you can judge us for without also throwing millions of other non-polyamorous families under the bus.

The relevance of significance

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 will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "relationship significance"

"I can't date another married woman*. I just can't," he said to me when we'd been, well, dating for a few weeks**.

This wasn't him breaking it off. He just didn't want to be my "boyfriend", he told me and I understood.

I really didn't mind. I was enjoying our whateveritwas, and had no complaints about the actual relationship, so to quibble over the terms he used to describe it, or to demand a greater demonstration of our relationship's significance through vocabulary, seemed pointless. We carried on "not dating", and I carried on being happy.

A month, or maybe two, later, he broke a brief moment of silence in the car. "Are you my girlfriend?" he asked me, with a smile that could almost have been shy. "Yes," I told him, but really, I meant "duh!" And that was the end of that.

I'm pretty sure that had I not been happy, and had our time together been less than wonderful, that lack of declared significance would have gnawed at me. Had he not been doing everything I wanted from a boyfriend, I expect I would have been stung by not not feeling able to use the word.

So I think there is a distinction between how we mark our relationships' significance and how significant they actually are, and I know which one is more important to my happiness. I won't deny that I get real pleasure from acknowledging the significance of my two relationships. I remember the first time I said "my husband" after the wedding, and realised that with that one word, people I didn't know would automatically consider him my family, my next of kin and my partner for life. It's a powerful shorthand. Similarly, when I say "my boyfriend" people know that I'm not just a married woman with a disposable bit on the side; he's valued and significant to me.

But if the words don't get used, those things are still true. It's a bit like saying "I love you" - I like to tell them, but I don't only love them when I'm saying it. My boyfriend and I recently celebrated four years of loving each other, and my husband and I will soon celebrate ten, but it isn't the celebrations that give these relationships their significance to me. It's just a delightful bonus.

In fact, a relationship that is marked with more significance than it deserves can be profoundly unsettling. Someone telling you that they love you, but not demonstrating it. Someone calling you their partner to other people, but not returning your calls. Someone who declares a level of commitment that they just aren't upholding.

Actions speak loader than words, but the right words are still sweet.

 

*He got over it.
**Whether we knew it or not.

Flexible festivities

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 will be found at www.polymeansmany.com from tomorrow. This month, our topic is "Happy Holidays!"

I think Christmas is a bit like monogamy - it feels non-optional, fixed and traditional, but it's ubiquitousness is really just a result of social conventions that can be taken to pieces and reconstructed any way you like. For some, the day has religious significance, and for some it's more about raucous drinking and indulgent eating. And for some it is both, of course. You don't have to set a Christmas pudding on fire, spend hundreds of pounds on presents or festoon your house in tinsel any more than you have to stick to one partner at a time. These things are all negotiable, even though society does its best to convince us that they are not.

But good God does society do its best to make you feel that you are missing out when you do. I've been told that I can't really love my husband if I want to see my boyfriend as well. I've been told that my daughter will grow up resentful and confused by the lack of a monogamous bond between her parents. People who don't have big, happy families are made to feel lonely because they are constantly being told how much they are missing out on. And people I know who've decided to break with their families' traditions and do something different over the holiday period have been made to feel that they've let people down. One of my siblings suggested off-handedly to our mum that her partner and children might like to go abroad for Christmas, but the resulting wave of guilt soon persuaded her to stick to the status quo. (And to be honest, I was glad, because I didn't want them to go either.) And, of course, polyamory creates yet further complications that can make doing what you want even harder. The more entangled we are in other people's lives and other people's wishes, the more complicated and fraught it can be to do our own thing.

If you've run into, or are likely to run into any of this, I obviously can't tell you how to fix it. The only general advice I have is to stay flexible. Remember that the whole holiday season is arbitrary, and so find places where you can bend to make things easier. Perhaps getting everyone you want together for December 25th is impossible, but you can treat it as a movable feast, and organise it for another day. Perhaps you could go for something close to our solution, which is to use Christmas Day as a biological family get together, and New Year's Eve for the other important people in our lives.

Things can be complicated. In previous years, our Christmas/New Year's plans have become very complicated indeed. But as this is traditionally the season for giving thanks, I do try to be thankful for these complications. Without them, I wouldn't be spending this season surrounded by people I love.

But what about the children?

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 www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "assumptions".

I've been subjected to more insults because I am non-monogamous than because I am bisexual. I even found more acceptance and understanding when I was a woman exclusively dating other women. This is clearly not because the UK is somehow more polyphobic than it is homophobic, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I'm now a parent, and becoming a parent unlocks a whole new level of public scrutiny. The belief that children need one mother and one father was, after all, key to recent debates surrounding marriage equality, and a study of attitudes towards consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships unsurprisingly found that most people associate monogamy with better parenting and a more stable family life.

The assumption is that although it may be one thing to be non-monogamous without children, if you decide to start a family, it's really time to put all that aside and just be normal, for the sake of the children.

With that in mind, my theory about the spectrum of acceptance of alternative lifestyles runs broadly along these lines:

1. Your way of life is immoral and you disgust me (no acceptance).
2. What consenting adults do behind closed doors is okay, but don't rub my nose in it in public.
3. I have no problem with you or your way of life, but I think that all children need one mother and one father, so you shouldn't ever have children.
4. How you live, who you are or what you have chosen may or may not be for me, but it shouldn't prevent you from the same range of possible participation in society that everyone else has (full acceptance).

So when I was more visibly not heterosexual, the people around me might have only been at "level 3" acceptance, but I wouldn't have noticed. But it's harder to avoid now, because everyone has an opinion about how to parent children.

This all means that damaging assumptions about any lifestyle outside of the heteromonoganormative mould becomes much more obvious when parenting is thrown into the mix. People who will have found you simply misguided, or maybe even fascinatingly non-conformist, will flip into judging you as immoral, cruel or negligent.

Elizabeth Sheff has conducted some of the most extensive research into polyamorous parenting so far, and one of her interesting findings is that far from being confused or by their non-traditional families, children aged 5-8 with three or more parents barely seem to even notice. Children are pretty self-centred, and so how the adults in their life relate to each other isn't particularly important to them. "A 6-year-old may not think of someone as mommy's girlfriend, but think of that person as 'the one who brings Legos' or 'the one who takes me out to ice cream," Sheff explains. To think about it another way, if you had close relationships as a child with non-parental members of your biological family, how much thought did you give to the fact that your uncle was your mother's brother, or your grandmother was your father's mother? I'm willing to bet that that was far less important and interesting than the time the two of you spent together, and the bond that was personal to you. It doesn't matter if the significant adults in my daughter's life are my blood relatives, my close friends, or my romantic partners, it's going to be a while before she cares about anything other than what those people have to offer her.

The older children Sheff spoke to who were aware that their families were "different", were grateful for "having multiple adults from which to draw upon for help with math homework or to provide transportation". Again, nothing to do with how those multiple adults related to each other. You can imagine a child with a live-in grandparent, or a close family friend living next door saying the same thing. Whether or not we are monogamous is pretty unimportant to our children - it's just a flashpoint that reveals the depth of prejudice against us.

This matters whether or not you have children and whether or not you ever intend to. If people are only accepting of you and your lifestyle because you're not a parent, that basically means that they think you should be denied access to certain types of family life. They think you're a lost cause, but they want to protect the next generation from making your mistake. They want to cut you off from full participation in society. That should bother you, whether you want to access that part of family life or not, because you're not fully accepted - you're just being shielded from their bigotry. Which is why, if you'll forgive me, we should be thinking about what they think about the children.

The space that's left

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 "the bad stuff".

I was pregnant only a few months after meeting my boyfriend. And if you know me, or have read any of this blog before, you'll know he is not the father. I'd been living with the father, my husband, for 5 years at that point, and we owned property together, not to mention cats and a lifetime of plans for our future.

When I met my husband, I was single, living alone in a rented flat, starting my first professional job, and had no fixed plans beyond the next 12 months. Neither of us had put down roots. The only things restricting our relationship were our desires, and once we were clear that they aligned, we headed pretty quickly towards the things we both wanted out of life and love: cohabitation, marriage, mortgage, cats and children. There was very little in our way.

When I think about the "bad stuff" in polyamory, it's hard for me to pin it down, because I'm really very happy with my lot. I have all the important things that I ever wanted, and plenty that I didn't think I could have. But I think that the more entangled we become, through living our lives, falling in love, putting down roots, making commitments and plans, the less space there is for these new connections that we've opened our hearts to.

Love isn't enough to sustain a relationship. We all know relationships that ended despite the love, not because of the lack of it. To grow, develop and thrive, a relationship needs space.

So not only was the space in my life pretty inflexible when I met my boyfriend, but it was about to become a lot more rigid, as I began to devote my energies to my daughter, even before she was born. The space available for our relationship to grow into was shrinking, and if that hadn't been enough for either of us, that would have been it. And once she was born, he found me retreating from him even further, as my time, energy and focus went into parenting.

These big life decisions - starting a family, moving house, settling down or shaking up your life-plans completely - are more of a risk and a limitation to polyamorous relationships than they are to the monogamous. What happens if one of your partners doesn't want to have children with you, but another one does? What happens if you and your partner plan to move across the country (or the world), but then you fall in love with someone new? What if you want to live with your partner, but the house they own with their other partner isn't big enough? What if you fall in love, but the person you fall in love with really doesn't have the time, or emotional energy, to make the connection with you that you're yearning for? If you have more than one relationship, these life decisions, both past and future, are more likely to come up, and love isn't going to be enough to fix them.

Luckily for me, he waited, and I came back to him and found our bond stronger than ever. Eventually, the space that my boyfriend and I had for each other turned out to be just right for the relationship that suits us. But I can imagine that if he hadn't seen the long-term view of wanting to be a part of my family, or hadn't loved children as much as he does, or hadn't enjoyed seeing how my life was developing, or hadn't been willing to support me when I had nothing to give back, or hadn't generally been as patient and understanding as he is, I might not be writing this blog from such a happy position.

So if I fall in love again, good luck to whomever that is. If they don't fit into my family, my two existing relationships, and aren't happy for our relationship to grow into the left over gaps and spaces that the rest of my life hasn't eaten up, it's probably not going to work out. But at the moment, problems caused by me having everything that I want don't seem too bad. I'll take the bad stuff when it leads to all this happiness.

Three years

Three years ago, to my complete surprise, I started developing feelings for the warm, sharp-witted man who is now my boyfriend. That makes it not only three years of a happy relationship, but three years since I considered my marriage not just non-monogamous, but polyamorous. It is a measure of how much I love and admire him that our relationship has changed me so fundamentally.

And not just me, but as the title of this blog suggests, my whole family. My husband and I don't want to be just a nuclear family any more. We don't want our connections to be just about love, sex or romance, but about drawing these connections into our family. We can now see how much our daughter thrives from these connections, and the attention of so many wonderful, loving people. This is a big change from how this blog started, when I just didn't know how having a child would affect my relationships, or quite what role our friends and lovers would play in her life. And as I wrote there, in the first entry in this blog, even that was a change from how my husband and I began, where we were (quite frankly) non-monogamous purely for the sex. I was so settled with my husband that I couldn't imagine falling in love with anyone else. I not only didn't desire it, I didn't think I was capable of it.

So I have grown in many ways that I am grateful for, and I am full of appreciation to the two most important men in my life for their role in this. To my boyfriend for giving me the love that proved me wrong, and my husband for being nothing but supportive and encouraging when he saw me falling for someone else. Thank you to them both for the best three years I've had so far.

"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.)

There's no way out...

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, Delightfully Queer, More Than Nuclear, Rarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "commitment"

One criticism of my open marriage that I've come up against time and time again is that a relationship without monogamy is a relationship without commitment. Just as we're often told that your partner can't really love you if they've fallen in love with someone else, if you claim to be committed to more than one person, you are, de facto, committed to neither, and if you claim to be committed but not exclusive, you are kidding yourself. I've even been asked (several times) why my husband and I even bothered to get married if we didn't want to commit to each other. Exclusivity is seen as synonymous with commitment, rather than being one possible commitment out of many.

I can accept that if my marriage was exactly the same as it is now but with the addition of us being sexually and romantically exclusive, we would be more committed than we are now. But that means very little to me, because that commitment is not something that we value. Similarly, I consider cohabitation a significant and important commitment, but if other people see living with their partner as something undesirable, or maybe just a trivial as matter as having a housemate, then this won't be a commitment that benefits their relationship.

Commitments aren't about what we want or how we feel, though that might be why we make them. If monogamy was easy, and it was unlikely that your partner would ever be tempted to stray, then committing to exclusivity wouldn't be considered so significant. Monogamy is a commitment because it involves resisting temptation if it arises, and talking openly about your girl/boyfriend, partner or spouse is one of the ways that monogamous people make this commitment clear to other people. When we make a commitment to someone, we don't mean we'll do it because we want to, we mean we'll do it whether we want to or not. It's more than just a promise, it's an obligation. A commitment is a promise we make that would be hard to break.

This is one of the reasons why, even without exclusivity, marriage is still a significant commitment to me. My husband and I didn't just promise to be together for the rest of our lives, we did so publicly, in front of our friends and family, and we continue to do so when we make our relationship status clear to people. Even without the legal and financial entanglements that were the result of our ceremony, the open, public nature of the promise we made makes it very difficult to back out. There are others, but marriage is a pretty effective commitment device.

Living together, owning property, paying bills together, integrating our social and familial lives, and raising a child would make separating our lives from one another difficult and traumatic. By voluntarily putting ourselves in that position, we have committed to the survival of our relationship, even if it becomes hard, and even if we change our minds.

In some ways, my relationship with my boyfriend is more romantic, as it lacks the prosaic, legal structure of my marriage. Our relationship does have its promises, but we have made few of the commitments that either of us would require from a primary, "marriage-type" relationship. We are able to choose to be together every day, and are confident that the reason we still have a significant and cherished place in each other's lives is because it is what we both want. My prediction is that this will continue indefinitely, but there is very little that would force us together should one of us change our minds.

Commitments don't have much to do with emotion. You can stay committed to an unhappy relationship, or, like my boyfriend and I, be happily in love without obligations holding you together. The latter is wonderful, but would not be enough for me to plan my life around. The fixed, secure nature of my husband's commitment to me was necessary for me to even consider him as the potential father of my child.

And then, despite the value I place on my marriage, all the commitments I have ever made shrink to nothing compared to the commitment I made by purposefully becoming a parent. A human being exists because of the decision my husband and I made together, and we are totally responsible for every aspect of her life so far.

Unlike my husband, our daughter had no part in negotiating our commitment to her. She is completely dependent on us honouring this commitment, through no choice or action of her own. Thinking about it in this way, I am struck with what a precarious position children are in when they are forced to trust their parents, despite having no control over that relationship. And aside from the very basics, little of what a parent should do for their child is explicit or public enough to make it a significant commitment.

So, as an effort to correct that, here is my attempt to draft my own, public commitment to her (beyond my legal requirement not to neglect her), with you as its first witnesses:

• As long as she is dependent on me, I will make her interests and happiness my primary concern. I will always consider carefully how my actions will affect her. I will be mindful of my control over her life, and her dependency on me.
• I will always treat her with kindness. If I ever need to deny her something that she wants, restrict her actions, or correct her mistakes, I will always do so kindly, respectfully and without shaming or intimidating her.
• I will try to make her childhood fun, and I will prioritise playfulness every day.
• Most importantly, I will make sure that she knows that my love for her is unconditional and constant. Nothing she does, neither her successes nor her failures, will alter how much I love her. She will never need to earn my affection or my attention.
• If I ever fail at any of these points (which I'm sure I will), I will apologise to her, and try to do better next time.

There is more, of course, but this is what I'm working on now. And fulfilling all this, whether I want to or not, is not easy. There are days when I enjoy parenting more than others, and some days when I would really like to ditch the responsibility entirely, but the commitment I made to her means that I can't back out. She needs this stability, just as I, to a lesser degree, need the commitments that my husband made to me. None of us want a way out of this.

Reflected love

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Love" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

My husband and I thought that having a baby would mean that some of our friends would drift away. Babies aren't everyone's cup of tea, and so we thought that some people might lose interest in us now that our lives revolved around one.

In fact, the opposite happened. It turns out, some of our friends were so interested in Small that they wanted to spend more time with us. Both of us have made new connections since Small was born, and those people seem to enjoy spending time with her as well as well. So we were wrong: having a baby seems to have made spending time with us more desirable, not less. We're surprised and lucky to have such an amazing, loving, child-friendly community around us.

And I love that people love her. I love nothing more than seeing people enjoying her company, not to mention investing time and effort into connecting with her. I love her so much that any kindness shown to her warms me as much as kindnesses offered to me directly.

Other parents will recognise how it feels to bask in this reflected love, but so will the polyamorous, I think.

I love my husband so much, that I warm to those that love him. When someone is enchanted by him, as I am, and wants to be in his company, that makes me happy. Monogamous people are sometimes baffled by this. They don't understand how my husband and I can not only put up with the fact that we love other people, but be delighted by it.

I don't know if I can explain it, because I find it hard to imagine being any other way. For me, love is, I think, fuel for more love.

5 tips for supporting your partner when they have a baby (and it isn't yours)

If you're visiting a new baby, this article at Offbeat Mama is a good starting point. But if one of the parents is your partner, it's probably not enough. You're not just visiting a baby, you're meeting an important new member of your family, and the worries about overstaying your welcome, or intruding at an emotionally vulnerable time probably don't apply. So, what should you do, and what can you expect?

After attending PolyDay for the second time, I'm aware that this might be an increasingly common situation in my community. You might be years off starting a family of your own, still looking for your perfect co-parent(s) or even be resolutely child-free, but the more relationships we have, the greater the chance is that one of our partners is at a different stage of life, or makes different decisions to us.

So you might not be ready to have children, or even want them at all, but now you have them, by proxy at least.

Either you are supportive of your partner's choice, and try to be involved with their new family member, or you risk drifting apart. Evolution gives new parents a one-track mind, so unless you're part of this, there's a good chance that they just won't have time for you.

So, if you decide you want to be a source of support, and a part of your partner's new family, how should you do it? You're in a better position than most of their friends, as not only do you probably know them better, but the intimacy that you have means that they may be more comfortable accepting your help and falling apart in front of you. My husband advises new parents to have no one around for long unless you would be comfortable crying in front of them, but you probably fall into that bracket, right?

1. Offer to help with nappies
If you've had a baby, you'll understand why I'm saying this. If you haven't, you'll probably be scared of the yuck and of doing it wrong. But most new parents haven't had a great deal of experience with this skill either, and now they have to do it 6-10 times a day. It's terrifying. So, if you're confident, offer to change a nappy, perhaps asking for supervision. If you're unsure, offer to help or ask to watch, so you can do it on your own next time. Even with poo, it's not that bad, I promise, and once you've done it (and the baby's parents can see you can do it), you'll feel much more comfortable with the idea of baby care, and become a much more useful source of support.

The parents might turn down your offers of help. Maybe they're uncomfortable having other people care for their new child, or maybe they're trying to be polite. They will definitely appreciate the offer. There won't be many people who feel comfortable or willing enough to offer, so it shows your commitment to both your partner, and keeping involved in this new person's life.

As time goes on, the parents will become more confident, and nappies will become less of an issue. But your early involvement will be a sound investment in keeping your bond with your partner and their child.

2. Feed the parents.
If you're visiting the new baby in hospital, after the birth, bring food. The mother and her birth partner(s) will be starving, and struggling to survive on hospital rations. Giving birth is hard work, even for the people who are just there for support, and it's likely none of them had a chance to eat much (or sleep at all) during labour. If you don't get a chance to ask them what to bring, cake and biscuits are usually safe. This is not the time for salad.

If you're visiting at home, bring food. New parents struggle to find time to eat, let alone prepare food. It can be hard to accept care from friends or even family, but you're probably used to caring for your partner, so they will probably be grateful of a cooked meal, or even a sandwich. Recovering from birth and beginning breastfeeding takes a tremendous number of calories just to keep on an even keel, so I guarantee that help in this area will be welcome, whether your partner is the mother, or just the co-parent who is trying to care for her. I had people bringing me plates of food, snacks and hunks of cake continuously for the first four weeks, and dear God it was amazing.

You know your partner better than most, so you'll know what sort of food they'll appreciate. Just make sure it takes little or no preparation, and if possible, can be eaten with one hand.

Oh, and if you ever see someone breastfeeding, offer her a drink.

3. Help around the house.
New parents might still feel like they have to 'host', but hopefully, you'll be close enough to both of them to be able to pitch in without them becoming uncomfortable. Someone did our washing up without asking when Small was two weeks old, and I'm still grateful. If you see any little jobs that need doing, just do them, and if you have the time to do anything more, ask if you could run a hoover around, or hang the washing out. Again, this is the sort of help that would make most people uncomfortable, but it's much easier to accept from someone you love.

4. Get comfortable with your new family member.
Get comfortable cuddling them, making faces, singing songs, patting and rocking them to sleep. Cuddling them as you dance around works with most newborns. The more confident you get with these new skills (and calming and keeping babies happy is definitely a skill!) the easier you'll find it both to support your partner, and stay an intrinsic part of their family.

Personally, in the first few months, I was usually desperate for a break from the dratted child (sorry, Small...) so was much happier when someone offered to hold her so I could throw on some washing, than if they had offered to help with the housework. Sometimes, what I really wanted was to have a bath with the bathroom door closed, so it might feel that just holding the baby isn't enough of a help, but your partner might be both grateful of the break, and happy that you want to spend time with their child.

5. Be aware that the ground has shifted
If your partner has just given birth, you'll know not to expect sex for a while, but even if your partner is the mother's co-partner, you might not be sharing a bed. The baby is the parents' priority, and newborns need parenting 24 hours a day. Everything is different now, and the space the two of you had before has gone. It will take time to work out how things have changed for you both.

It's not easy to predict how the recovery will affect the intimacy between you and your partner, even if your partner isn't the one recovering from the birth. The first few weeks are overwhelming, but it will get easier. There is a reason everyone tells you that they grow up so fast. It's a cliché, but they really do. It may seem almost impossible for you to find space to be with your partner now, but things will change incredibly quickly. The two of you can find a way to reconnect, but you'll need to be patient and gentle with the parents, and don't push it.

There is also no exaggeration to the cliché that your life is never the same again after having children, so you can't expect your partner to give you what they used to. But don't see this as a bad thing. Supporting your partner as they settle into parenthood will bring you closer in a new way, and when they're able, they will be even more delighted to support you with your life changes, whatever those will be.

Being a part of a person's life right from the very beginning is a peculiar and rare privilege, and so even as things between you and your partner are changing, new opportunities for love are blossoming. Enjoy it. They grow up so fast.

Where do you find the time?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Daily Life" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

"Where do you find the time?" This is the question I'm most often asked when I tell other mothers about my relationships. I don't always manage, I tell them, but this is why it is worth it

There are several different ways and places that we spend time together. Tonight, it works something like this.

My boyfriend and I have a date. Before I became a parent, this would mean I would go to his place, he would cook dinner, we'd have sex, plan to watch a film, talk too much, realise it was too late, cuddle up, and go to sleep. We rarely went out together. Now, it works differently. I check with my husband, (as me going out means he must stay in), and I put the date into our calendar.

Before my husband and I were married, when we lived more than 50 miles apart, I would plan our time together carefully in advance. I would think about food, drink, clothes, hair and makeup, daydreaming about that first touch, that first kiss. We took care to show each other our best faces, and tried to make our limited time perfect. After many years of living together, we still plan our time together in this way, but only rarely. We see each other every day, and so our days are filled with little, unplanned moments of intimacy that make planning ahead less of a necessity. In some ways, my relationship with Jemmy is locked into the old model: even though we have been together longer than any of my other relationships barring my marriage, the structure doesn't change much. Our time together is always precious, rarely casual. The terminology the polyamorous use to pin down these differences rarely seems satisfactory, but whether you call it primary and secondary, domestic and non-domestic, live-in and not, the two are just different. With my husband, there is always tomorrow, but with Jemmy, there rarely is.

And like I used to when my husband lived far away, I daydream about our time together. I imagine how he will smile when I open his front door, how it will feel when I touch him and take him into my arms. My husband and I rarely embrace the way he and I do any more, which might sound sad, but it's not. It's bittersweet to see your lover after a separation, even if it's just a few days, and so this fervency makes up for lost time that I don't lose with my husband. With him, there is no bitterness to make up for.

If Jemmy and I are going to have dinner together, this means my husband has to handle both dinner time and bed time for our daughter. There's a strange pull of freedom and guilt to that. In any case, the last thing I do before leaving the house is feed Small, and I do so, praying that she will go to sleep easily without me. She's usually had her dinner by this point, and might even be in her pyjamas ready for bed, depending on when I leave. I say goodbye to them both, and my husband sends Jemmy his love.

I still don't leave my daughter often, or for long. Evenings at home are not the same; even without considering the knife-edge of awareness that she is asleep upstairs and could wake up at any time, there are always things I need to do. At his house, I'm off duty, but still at home. He cooks me dinner, he fetches me a drink, and I can't spend the time with the housework of parenting, preparing for the next day. There is no baby upstairs. We would like to spend more time all four of us together, as a family, but sometimes, I need this. It's worth making the time for.

The evening probably passes much as you imagine it would, with the subtle differences that make all relationships unique. At some point, I start to become more aware of the time. There are consequences to staying out late. My daughter might need help to sleep; my husband has work in the morning, and I don't want him to be tired, or to feel that my time with Jemmy creates a burden on him; and I rarely get more than a couple of hours sleep at a time, so feel an urgent pull to bed as the evening wears on. And I won't be sleeping at this house.

As we say goodnight, he tells me he wishes that I could stay, and we talk about the indeterminate future, when the demands of parenting will have lessened enough for this to be possible. We remember waking up together, lazing around his house over breakfast before getting dressed. But not tonight. It's a wrench to leave him after so few hours, but I'm running out of time.

Back at home, my husband is waiting up for me, and I think how incredibly lucky I am to be loved by these two men. Our daughter is asleep beside him, and I climb into bed between them, taking care not to wake her. Without any conscious thought we find ourselves in each other's arms, the high-pitched sounds of her breathing behind me. It's strange and beautiful to leave them both and come back with fresh eyes. Although just a moment ago I was wishing to be elsewhere, now, I wouldn't be anywhere else.

No rules? No such thing.

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Rules and Boundaries" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

Most of what is written about rules in polyamorous relationships concerns rules designed to limit secondary relationships or to protect the security of a primary relationship. A particular (and valid) concern is that sometimes rules are put in place before the secondary relationships even exist, and so at least one of the people who will be subjected to them can't be consulted and it doesn't seem fair to place restrictions around a relationship that doesn't even exist yet.

A couple might decide that they will go on dates no more than once a week, or maybe just that they will never organise dates on a Friday. They could insist that they will never allow their primary partner to sleep alone, that they will each have the power of "veto" over the other's new relationships or maybe that potential new partners must be actively approved. There are all kinds of rules that people in polyamorous relationships (especially newly non-monogamous ones) might create to protect their own relationship by limiting their others.

I'm not going to write about those sort of rules, because we don't have them and we don't want them. The stability of my marriage has honestly never concerned me and so we didn't design any rules to protect it. And now, my relationship with my boyfriend and my husband's relationship with his girlfriend bring nothing but good things into our lives, so why would we want to limit them with rules?

But there are limits around them. We haven't purposefully chosen rules or boundaries to limit them, but they do exist. The most obvious ones are there because we have a baby.

Having a baby means that my husband and I need to ask the other's permission before we go out on dates, because the other will be on their own with the baby. It means that we can't go away for more than a few hours without creating a serious imposition on the other. It means that I can't stay at my boyfriend's place overnight as I used to, or even be away from my daughter for long. She certainly can't be left alone, and more specifically, she can't get through the night without me. Becoming a parent has placed all kinds of limits around my life, and the more I try to pin down exactly what those limits are, the more they look like that list of hypothetical rules that I said we didn't want.

We may not feel the need to restrict our secondary relationships, but they've been restricted anyway.

I think that the goal of trying not to restrict relationships before they begin is a good one, but I don't think it is always as practical as some people think. I think everyone has limits in their lives that can restrict or even stunt the success of their relationships. Some of those limits might be there for practical reasons, like a mortgage or a demanding job, and some might be there by choice, like the desire to become, or not become, a parent, or the desire to spend a certain amount of time with an existing partner.

Things change. My boyfriend is being patient and understanding with these restrictions around our relationship, partly because he knows that they are reasonable and necessary, and partly because he knows that Small won't be a baby forever. Life changes, and so the space we have for other people changes too. If you want an unlimited amount of space so your relationship can take its most natural, unrestricted form, it's probably best not to date parents, or the polyamorous. And definitely not both.

Personally, I don't want that. The limits that restrict my relationships are there because of the shape of my life, and I want my relationships to be with people with equally full and interesting lives. I know that my boyfriend and my husband's girlfriend love and cherish my daughter, despite the limitations she has created. The things that restrict your relationships might also be the things that make life beautiful and interesting.

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.

Needs and wants

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Needs/wants" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

When it comes to our relationships, what do we need, and what do we merely want? In most cases, I think it's a false and maybe even unhelpful distinction.

Babies don't know the difference. Gina Ford, The Baby Whisperer and other parenting experts advise against feeding babies whenever they cry, because if babies got what they wanted, they might end up being fed so often it exhausts the mother. They just don't need milk this often. Far better, they say, to stretch the distance between their feeds to 2, 3 or even 4 hours to make sure that they are really hungry, and will take a sufficient "good" feed.

Two weeks ago, a study was published that suggested that scheduling or stretching out their feeds in this way might actually lower their IQ. Babies who were fed on demand (whether than was with a bottle or the breast) performed significantly better at school, even when their parents only demand-fed because they couldn't handle sticking to the routine. Feeding to a schedule is also associated with childhood obesity, as babies are trained to take in more milk than is comfortable to encourage less frequent feeding.

So if you have a baby like mine, who fed erratically, often more than once an hour, is satisfying this hunger just a want, or is it a need?

The same study found that to a certain extent, Gina Ford and The Baby Whisperer were right - feeding your baby to a schedule results in mothers who are better rested and who report feeling less tearful and overwhelmed. Making their child wait made them more likely to get what they wanted.

So, to put it bluntly, as a parent, you have a choice: sublimate your own desires, or stunt your child's intelligence and health. When it comes to going to the toilet, waiting for a more convenient place to pull the car over, or leaving my dinner to burn, I sometimes choose me. But what having a baby has taught me about my own needs and wants is that a lot of things I thought I needed, like unbroken sleep, I could actually do without. I still want more sleep, of course, but I'm surprised at how little I actually need.

Which is why I think that when it comes to romantic relationships, the distinction between wants and needs is misleading. Some of the things that you thought you needed, you may discover that you can do without, as I discovered I could do without sleep for my daughter. But if you don't want to do without them, do you need to reframe it as a "need" to make that desire valid?

When people ask us why, if my marriage is so happy, do we need other partners, I say that I don't. It's not that I need other partners; I just don't need monogamy. I could do it - I just don't want to. Why is it necessary to need other partners for me to seek them out?

There is a risk, I suspect, that separating out what you need from what you merely want could make it easier for you and maybe even your partners to to treat these things as "not important". Just because you don't need something, (whether that is a daily phonecall or a regularly cleaned bathroom) it doesn't mean that it isn't important - as I've shown, ignoring what babies want might have very serious consequences. Fellow "Poly Means Many" blogger, Polly Oliver has written about how she values a certain degree of selfishness in her partners, and I think she's right. It's healthy to want things. My daughter wanted food more often than I was told she would, and it turns out, she had good reasons.

But just as giving up what you want can be a bad idea, you might need to put aside some of the things you had previously labeled as "needs" to keep a relationship that's important to you. It can be so so worth it, as becoming a mother has shown me. I have so little of the things I thought I needed, but am happier and more fulfilled than ever. Even if I still wish I got more sleep.

"You just haven't met the right one yet."

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Explaining polyamory to the monogamous" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

When explaining polyamory to the disbelieving or curious, it's common to use the analogy of a parent's love for their children: nobody doubts that you can love more than one child , so why is it hard to believe you can love more than one partner?

Ahh, the disbelieving monogamists will say, but parental love is different. You just haven't met the right one yet. When the right person comes along, that love will be so strong that you won't want any others, and you'll want to be monogamous, too. You can't love two people the way you can love two of your children.

And of course it is different, but it's not as different as people think.

In some of the early research into the links between our relationship with our parents and our romantic relationships as adults, Hazan and Shaver noted that both lovers and parent-child pairs "play with one another's facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another". This tender gazing into each other's eyes and stroking their hair or cheek, an act so linked to romantic love it is little more than a cliche, is something very familiar to parents. Sally Read, in her poem Latching On, describes the look on a newborn's face as 'like a lover's eyes'. The last poem I posted on my blog is a love poem, but it's there because I am often reminded of it when I look at my daughter's face. It looks right, as Muir puts it, as if hers is the perfect human face and all others lack for something. I have had that feeling when looking at a lover, but never this strongly.

Sylvia Plath's poem You're is about her unborn child, but was published in The Nation's Favourite Love Poems. Just as the polyamorous will sometimes use a parent's love for their children to explain how you can love more than one romantic partner, it would be difficult to explain how I feel about my daughter without making it sound like a grand passion, and many poets have done exactly that.

Other similarities that Hazan and Shaver noted (summarised here) are that both lovers and parent-child pairs 'feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive', 'engage in close, intimate, bodily contact', 'feel insecure when the other is inaccessible, 'share discoveries with one another' and of course 'engage in "baby talk"'. Of course there are differences (sex being the most obvious) but so many of the key features are the same, that many psychologists now think that our relationship with our parents can work as a sort of test run for our adult love affairs. We learn how to form loving relationships of all kinds from our parents, and children who are securely attached to their parents, find romantically attaching themselves to others easier as adults.

When I am separated from her, I feel her physical absence keenly, and can easily fixate on how much I want to hug her. My husband sometimes holds her hand while she is asleep. The comfort and joy we share when we hold her, kiss her, nuzzle our faces into her neck, blow raspberries on her belly and pretend to eat her toes is not at all unlike a romantic passion, and, as Kate Saunders puts it, it is definitely the stormiest love affair of my life so far.

And quite honestly, I struggle to imagine loving another baby quite this strongly. Wouldn't this powerful love stunt the growth of any love I would feel for a second child? How could I possibly love any other in quite this way?

But of course, I know that I could. I see, all around me, parents in multiple loving relationships with their children, so although I sometimes struggle to conceptualise it as possible, I know that it can be done

Perhaps the difficulty people face in comparing multiple loving relationships between parents and their children and between the polyamorous is simply this lack of good models. Conducting relationships openly this way is not the norm, so when people feel that they couldn't love another, the way that new parents often do, where do they see polyamorous relationships modelled the way I see parents loving more than one child? Our society's prevailing narrative of love comes down as strongly on the side of the "one true love" story of romance as it does on the multiple love story of parenthood.

It would be offensive in the extreme to suggest to a mother or father of multiple children that they just "hadn't had the right child yet", and when "the one" arrived, they would naturally lose interest in the children they had before. It would be unconscionably rude to doubt a parent when they say that they love all of their children, and that they have no desire to have a one child family.

And if you can imagine how it might feel if someone said that about you and your children, you can probably imagine how I feel when I'm told I just "haven't met the right one yet".

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.

Body confidence and the lesser-known benefits of monogamy

I've written before about how I liked what pregnancy did to my body. That's really only part of the story: I liked it until the ninth month, and then I was too big to do much, and I got stretch marks.

I thought maybe that I had escaped, but then, only a few weeks away from my due date, they grew like a climbing vine up to my bellybutton. I didn't care that I had put on weight in pregnancy - weight can be lost - but stretch marks are permanent. I was upset, but I pulled myself together and decided that as long as they stayed below my bellybutton, I'd be okay with them.

Of course, they spread above my bellybutton. At 41 weeks pregnant, I had an angry red crack of lighting spreading up from my knickers.

Where polyamory comes into this is with potential new partners, or even current occasional lovers. If Gaius and I were monogamous, I wouldn't need to worry about what anyone else thought of me naked: his would be the only opinion that mattered. And as far as he is concerned, the fact that I carried and birthed his daughter can only make me more beautiful. If our relationship was sexually exclusive, I wouldn't have had any of these wobbles.

And even if Gaius, Jemmy and I were poly-fidelitous, my body troubles would be gone. Jemmy has an exceptionally catholic taste in women (physically, at least) and even if that weren't true, he has always made me feel beautiful for more than just my body. So it wasn't his admiration waning that troubled me either.

The reason for my (rather uncharacteristic) worries was that my two current partners are not "it" for me. New lovers are an unknown quantity. Will they be secretly turned off by my soft, wrinkled belly? Disappointed by my sagging breasts? These are fears that just wouldn't bother me if I were monogamous.

A few days before I actually gave birth, I am ashamed to admit, I obsessed a little bit about all this. After my friend Lori blogged about body confidence, I mentioned that I was dealing with it, and she and another friend were so sweet to me, that I cried. I am pretty sure now that I was actually in early labour at the time, which might explain my emotional knife-edge, but still. Their kind words were very reassuring.

What they told me was something I was trying to convince myself of at the time: our bodies change, but we shouldn't see changes as losing attractiveness, but as the mark of the things we have survived and achieved. They talked about the beauty of laughter-lines, and the story that scars can tell. They were, of course, right. Two months after Small was born, I looked down at my soft, wrinkled belly with its network of scars, thought "fuck it", and bought a bikini.

I still think that there is a chance that new lovers might find my body less appealing than they would have done before the baby. And while that is not ideal, it is okay. Between my lined belly and my lower, softer breasts, I have completely nourished two people for well over a year. My daughter is happy, healthy and thriving because of my body, and these changes will be a permanent reminder of this. I look down at my belly, with its network of scars and think "there was a baby in there", and that is miraculous and wonderful to me. If people can't see that when they look at me, then fuck 'em. I know that my body is amazing.

The Poly Tribe

A little while ago, I stumbled across a book called "The Continuum Concept", by Jean Liedloff. This book is one of the forerunners to Attachment Parenting, which is a parenting style that we found ourselves adopting to some extent before we knew that it existed.

Attachment parenting, however (as is nearly all modern parenting advice), is based on the concept of the nuclear family. In the Contiuum Concept, the emphasis is on sharing your life (including parenting) with a tribe. Because babies are at their most content when being carried, for example, you carry your baby in your arms or in a sling. Unlike parents who are doing this alone, if you need to put your baby down, you pass her to another tribe member. In the Amazonian society that Liedloff examined, parenting was shared, and so were the tasks of everyday life.

The parenting books and websites that I read when I was pregnant all warned about the stress that having too many visitors can put on new parents. Instinctively, we ignored this advice, and for the first few weeks, we had near constant streams of family and friends staying with us. This was partly because we are both extroverts, but also because we knew that those we loved could be called on to help. And many of those that came had children of their own, so they knew what would be useful to us: they cooked our meals, cleaned our kitchen, changed nappies, and cuddled our restless newborn while we slept. This support meant that I could concentrate on little more than breastfeeding and rest. And really, this is how millions of people around the world get through the difficult neonatal period. We're not meant to do this alone.

We are lucky that we have a large, supportive and loving extended family who were helpful without being smothering. But because we know how lucky we are, we also know that relying on family is not enough. We need a tribe.

Which is why both Gaius and I love the idea that Small will have Jemmy in her life. He can be relied on to offer support to us, and in the future, we all hope that she will consider him to be part of her tribe. More than this, we have friends, lovers and potential new partners whom we would like to share our family with in a million little ways, big and small. Similarly, I see a future where some of those we love will have children of their own, and having had such wonderful support offered to us, we can pass it on. We will know to cook their meals, clean their kitchen, change nappies, and (most importantly) bond with our newest tribe member by cuddling him or her, so the parents can have a break.

I know that many in the world think that lifestyles and sexual proclivities such as ours make us unsuitable parents, but I see the possibility that our lives are growing towards something even more wonderful and supportive for our family than the more traditional childhoods that Gaius and I were privileged to enjoy.

Where the concept of the tribe and my ideal differs, is that the people I surround myself with are here by choice. Even our families, now we are adults, are part of our tribe because we want them to be, not just because we are related. And my partners, lovers and friends are all people that I respect, love and cherish for their input in our lives. This is where polyamory comes in, because the bonds that we make when we love each other are not only as strong as a loving family, but they are all with people that we have chosen, and we value for their contribution to our lives, in many different ways. Some of these people will be our relatives, but others will not. Polyamory means that our tribe does not just create love, it is built on it.