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.

Jealousy

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 "Jealousy" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

March's topic was on Jealousy: a very common topic when discussing polyamory. I wasn't able to take part, but please have a look at those who did!

"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".

'Motherbaby'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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