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.

"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.

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.

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.