The Public and Private Realms of Postpartum Intimacy
In which the portal of parenthood demands a reconsideration of self and safety.
What does it mean to be ready?
Ready to have sex? Ready to have a baby? Ready to have sex again after having a baby? Ready to talk to others about having sex again after having a baby?
Well, I’m finally “ready” to talk about postpartum intimacy. I first started scribbling down thoughts for this piece at two years postpartum. I’m now getting closer to three, am eight months pregnant with my second child, and am feeling the need to actually finish scooping out this perspective before diving into a completely new postpartum experience.
Every time I returned to this piece, I realized I had so much more untangling to do, and so many more connections to make before it could be at all contained into a single read.
Before being completely absorbed and immersed into the postpartum period myself, I had never read or heard about the lived experience of having sex postpartum outside of the discussion of tissues and muscles healing enough for touch. Physical healing of individual body parts is, while a very important factor, far from the only consideration surrounding “readiness”.
The framework that surrounds being “ready” for postpartum intimacy puts birthing people on a standardized clock of healing, where 6 weeks is seen as the “end”, but really, we know that marker of time is more of a continuation, if not a beginning in and of itself. This framework also completely, and obviously, ignores the emotional and mental comments of feeling “ready” to have sex.
Looking back at the early postpartum months now, it’s easy to write off sex, and the ability to want to and to be able to have pleasurable, consensual sex as a low priority. In many ways, it is. A baby completely restructures the priorities and hormones of those providing care, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But it’s also normal to crave a sense of familiarity, of safety, of warmth, and of connection with the person who you’ve just upended your whole world with to bring forth new life together. Both can be true, and I try to write on my experiences in the past with this particular awareness.
As someone who prided themselves in feeling prepared for parenthood (what does that even mean) I felt very unprepared for the changes that would come about to my sexual sense of self in pregnancy and postpartum, in both private and public realms.
Early parenthood greatly increased what felt somewhat like a spotlight in the public realm. A big belly bump or a new baby wrapped on my chest drew in conversation and comments. While mostly completely conveying of the warm, universal love of babies, this also sometimes felt like being vulnerably trapped under a much too bright, fluorescent bulb, while others simply watched.
What are the chances that the same people who made me feel unsafe and rattled my nervous system in my body both before my pregnancy and during pregnancy are the ones who made me feel unsafe by casually asking me about my sex life postpartum?
In hindsight, I would say, pretty high. But then again, I can’t really blame them, even though I want to.
To provide the context that I had to continually re-provide myself with when ruminating over why people close to me felt the need to initiate invasive discussions of my postpartum sex life with me: I used to love talking about sex with other people. I loved connecting about all of the fun, silly, erotic, awkward, and relatable aspects of engaging in such a common, special, and sacred experience.
I loved sharing about what kind of vibrators and dildos were most enjoyed, as well as what kind of lube brands were worth trying out. I routinely laid out educational and comical zines about vulvas, sex, consent, and bodies on my coffee table before friends came over, easefully sparking a potential conversation.
I considered myself extremely sex positive.
The people in my life were used to this Meg. I was used to that Meg. My partner was used to this Meg.
But then I got pregnant with my first, and everything shifted. Ironically, even though my pregnancy began with sex, it ultimately became the biggest transition thus far in my life in how I related to myself as a sexual person. I did not feel sexy during my first pregnancy. I had a chronic yeast infection the entire time, felt bloated, exhausted, nauseous, and was vomiting at least four or five times a day every single day for five months. I kept waiting for the glowy, sexy, and somewhat ridiculous pregnancy libido that I had read about and seen depicted in TV to arrive in my previously very sensual body, but it didn’t.
Then my baby was born, and once again, everything shifted even more. There was now an incredibly fragile, tiny, extremely brave, and beautiful person who clung to me for life, literally. There was no mistaking that they were now my priority, entirely. My whole body was oriented towards theirs in every way possible. My breasts, swollen with milk, erupted constantly with spurts of liquid magic every time my baby made a sound. I touched the top of their head and was instantly brought back to the ethereal moment of them crowning where time stood still. My body was now a map of motherhood, marked deeply with love.
My arms were full of baby, my breasts were full of milk, and my body was still full of so much blood, slowly making its way out. Where was any room left for anything else?
As the days and weeks went on, my body slowly began to heal itself. There started to be more room. There were brief moments opening themselves up for loving connection with the person that I made a person with.
But if we are hugging, or if we are kissing, my mind would race, then no one is holding the baby, who, albeit, was peacefully and warmly asleep a few feet away on our bed.
Even if someone else had been holding them, I know that my mind would have raced down the same road during those moments. There may have been more room in my body to move around and lovingly embrace people other than my baby, but there wasn’t in my brain.
At two months postpartum, I was casually asked in the middle of a small dinner gathering at a restaurant, one of our first social excursions, if my partner and I had had sex yet.
My body froze. The spotlight turned on.
I felt an immediate flood of vulnerability, paired with disbelief that someone would ask me that question in the particular sort of uninhibited manner that comes from a white cishet man with a laugh and a beer in hand.
I sat there for, what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a moment, dumbstruck, holding my newborn, silent.
Being out in public with my teeny, tiny, perfectly new human amidst the noise, movement, and crowds was already hard enough for my highly sensitive postpartum nervous system, but being asked about the timeline of my sex life in that same space felt impossibly invasive and overwhelming.
Somewhere in the eerie eternity of that lingering moment, I vaguely remember eventually saying “No, definitely not.”
I carried around a pit in my stomach the rest of the evening. My body had felt so public during my pregnancy, and all I wanted after giving birth was to return to any semblance of the physiological privacy that I had once enjoyed.
The only person that I could envision that question appropriately, safely, and gladly coming from at the time was my midwife.
We had, in fact, just spoken with my midwife, only two weeks prior, about postpartum sex, at my six week visit. This conversation took place cocooned in her homey office, a space in which my body had grown accustomed to feeling heard, seen, and supported over the past year. Her office did not actually resemble an “office”, as we traditionally think of them, but was more akin to a friend’s living room. There was a comfy couch that pulled out into a bed in the case of a precipitous birth during a prenatal visit. Warm paint colors of oranges, pinks, and yellows coated the walls. The floor was adorned with colorful rugs, and toys for siblings to play with, and an actual tree that reached to the ceiling and stood perfectly in place to be admired by those receiving pelvic exams beneath it.
This singular space, and the person I had spent a year getting to know and trust intimately, holding space inside of it, was someone that I felt comfortable discussing the tremendously overwhelming idea of being sexual again after creating and pushing a new life out of my body.
This conversation didn’t even begin until my midwife had already spent over an hour gathering emotional and physical context for where my individual body was at. She waited until she had completed a pelvic exam, where she considered my bleeding that was still present. She waited until she responded to my concerns about potential infection due to the distinctive scent of the lochia. She waited until she listened to my complaints about still experiencing immense pain while urinating. She waited until we talked about how I was feeling emotionally. My partner was sitting next to me, holding our baby, both of their presences also a primary factor within the equation of how our new family unit was doing.
She considered the conversation of my body’s readiness to have sex or not to have sex with all of these physical and emotional factors in mind.
Although asking other couples about their sex lives should always be done so with care and awareness, these factors are so much more important when discussing postpartum sex.
I left my six week postpartum visit feeling held, supported, and mostly validated (she told me my urinary pain was probably a UTI, even though I was positive it wasn’t. Spoiler alert: I was right.)
But I felt no pressure to have sex, and no pressure to feel ready to have sex.
After that dinner gathering though, I felt angry. I felt embarrassed. I felt shameful. How could someone think that is an okay question to ask someone two months postpartum?! I asked my partner, to which he gently responded that most people have no idea what it’s like to be postpartum, and that they see you as the same person they’ve always known.
Despite this very logical response and the continued supportive conversations my partner and I had about it, I remained angry about the interaction for probably a year and a half.
Somewhere else, a little later on, in the foggy timeline of early postpartum, I was on the phone with a relative who had called to check in. Somehow the conversation of whether my partner and I were having sex yet came up.
I was at home, and the distance of the question coming through the phone instead of across the table in a public space initially made it easier to respond, along with the fact that the person asking this time was a woman.
I started to explain the layers that complicated the reality of having sex after giving birth. I’m not sure if it was my lack of confidence in what I was trying to explain, or their perceived good intentions of wanting to connect with me on a topic that the two of us used to relate to all the time on, that, once again, can be traced back to my personal background context, but the conversation quickly shifted on their end to the recommendation that I should “ just have sex” with my partner and that they would also send me a new vibrator.
I handed the phone to my partner and said the baby needed me, again, completely taken aback and unsure of how to respond.
Looking back with the same personal background context I provided at the beginning of this piece, I can see how the people posing these questions could potentially see me as a reliable and viable person to inquire about the realities of postpartum intimacy with.
The funny thing is that now, at this stage of my postpartum journey, I would gladly share my perspectives on postpartum intimacy, as I currently am by writing and publicly sharing this piece with all of you.
So if you’re thinking of asking someone who’s just given birth if they’ve had sex yet, maybe wait at least two and a half years…but I’d also recommend rephrasing the question, and asking yourself why you feel entitled to that knowledge.
Although I highly doubt these people remember asking, both instances have stuck with me. At the time, despite all the confidences I had in myself, as someone who had studied perinatal health for years, was a birthworker, and was well versed in the the absurdity of the narratives surrounding postpartum recovery that are so commonly projected on birthing people in the United States, the asking of that question made me falter.
Did they assume we were already having sex? Are other people at this stage postpartum already having sex? Will I ever want to have sex again? These questions started to regrettably creep into my mind.
Even though I didn’t feel ready at 6 weeks, or 8 weeks, I did still expect to feel ready relatively soon. It came as a surprise, to myself at least, and I’m sure to my partner, when I confided in him, at somewhere around those early months postpartum, while crying and holding my newborn, that I no longer wanted to be touched in any romantic or sexual way, whether that was a kiss or a gentle pat on the bum.
At the time, I simply did not feel like I could handle another physical, or even emotional relationship outside of the one I had with my baby. That relationship demanded my full attention and everything my body had. It didn’t feel like there was anything left to give to anyone else. I didn’t want someone taking any other parts of me. I needed every ounce of myself I could seem to find scattered around inside.
On top of feeling emotionally tapped out, I also didn’t know that my urinary pain would continue, after multiple assumed diagnoses of a UTI continued to be tossed my direction by different providers, for months. I would yelp on the toilet every time I sat down, wondering if this was simply my life now, until I was recommended, by my postpartum doula and IBCLC who happened to send a random check-in text, to see a pelvic floor physical therapist. I had heard of the immense benefits of pelvic floor PT before, but for some reason (postpartum brain, mom brain, lack of sleep, etc.) I forgot to even consider this as a potential avenue for support regarding my urinary pain. On my first visit to my PT, she listened at length, did an internal exam and concluded that she could easily fix it in three sessions. She did exactly that, and I am eternally grateful.
After I got my urinary pain sorted, I started working with my PT on getting rid of pain during intercourse. I practiced stretches, exercises, breathing, massage, different types of lube. In the midst all of this preparation, it seemingly left very little room for libido to actually have a role in shaping a pleasurable experience that can realistically have time to take place before I get beckoned back to my breastfeeding baby.
It seemed like a lot of work on my part that also included potential for pain, not to mention I was hearing phantom baby cries the whole time, despite living in a studio, which meant my baby was always within a few feet of me.
There are so many reasons people have sex, and I remember wanting to have sex simply because I missed my partner. It was one of the primary sources of connection before having kids, and it took me a while to realize that there would have to be new sources, at least temporarily.
I look back on those many months following childbirth, where my body felt so different, so new, so raw, and so vulnerable, as a distinct season. I can see that it has passed, and that although I’m still a new person, I’ve also returned to myself in certain ways.
It took me a full two years to get both my bleed and my libido back. Ironically, but not at all surprisingly, the somewhat feral return of my libido promptly led to the desire for a second baby, which then very quickly became a reality.
This pregnancy has been almost completely different though, and has been tremendously easier. Very minimal vomiting, manageable nausea, not working full time, more time to rest, no yeast infection, a very high libido, and a lifestyle full of much more joy and less stress.
Who knows what this next postpartum journey will bring, but I now gladly carry the experiences and perspectives I’ve collected along the journeys that have brought me here into this next portal of parenthood.