When I was carrying my first son, I made a couple of naïve—some might even say dumb—promises to myself. The first: my boyfriend and I wouldn’t stop having sex once we were parents like everybody said we would. The second: we wouldn’t, under any circumstances, co-sleep with the baby, which would almost certainly make the first dumb promise impossible to keep.
Our entire relationship, we’d had a very healthy amount of sex (thus the unexpected baby), and co-sleeping, while fine for anti-vaccine Democrats and Tori Spelling, was not for us. Not just because we were still going to be Sex-Having People, but also every parent I knew who let a kid sleep in their bed made it seem harder to stop doing than, say, heroin.
Over the course of my pregnancy, my boyfriend—who is now my husband, holding for applause—was exposed to unspeakable things. Things that having a man witness would have made 26-year-old me positively suicidal. Hysterical weeping over ads for soup, sure, but also darker incidents like hysterical weeping while plunging a toilet, nude and gigantic, only weeks away from giving birth.
Our entire relationship we’d had a very healthy amount of sex (thus the unexpected baby), and co-sleeping, while fine for anti-vaccine Democrats and Tori Spelling, was not for us.
But through the whole gestational ordeal we continued to have regular sex (God knows how, now that I’m really remembering the toilet thing). I remained optimistic about my plan to be a parent and a whole human person. We built a crib and bought one of those little bassinets that goes next to your bed. We hemmed and hawed over whether we would pick the baby up when he cried at night or let his first tough lesson be about the dangers of bothering others with your needs.
Our son arrived early due to a boring medical emergency I won’t bother you with. But, as a consequence of being on the runty side, he had an overdeveloped “startle reflex.” This meant that if you put him on his back, he went wild, thinking he was falling through time and space. Unfortunately, “on their backs” is how babies are supposed to sleep. But when we laid our son on his back he screamed like one of those motion-activated Halloween decorations. The only way the baby or I could get any sleep at night was if I was semi-reclined at a 45-degree angle while he rested on my chest, like we were tandem parachuting. Of course, this took place in our bed, which meant we were co-sleeping. Oops.
Many parents end up co-sleeping by necessity rather than choice—either because this is the only way their kids can sleep, or the only way they can. I was disappointed in myself, but what else could I do, other than desperately ask other parents things like “It’s fine, right? Nobody is still sleeping with their parents at 11, right?” Trust me, if you’re considering co-sleeping, you won’t like the answer to this.
It can be a long time to go without having your bed to yourself, which puts a crimp in the whole “sex on your time” thing, let alone actual rest. One woman actually said to me, “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I need my sleep too much!” And if you’re wondering, no, they will never find this woman’s body.
We have three kids now, and while the two oldest stay in their own bed—barring the time I idiotically screened Labyrinth for them and they all had nightmares about David Bowie for weeks—we have a toddler who still ends up in bed with us the majority of the time.
I’m not an aberration (about this, anyway). Because the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children sleep in the same room as their parents for six months, preferably a year, other parents are presumably having sex in the same room as their babies, too. I often think about what things must have been like in the Dark Ages, when families piled in 10 to a bed for warmth. Imagine being just down the mattress from your in-laws. Having one sleeping baby in a Pack ’n Play in the corner doesn’t seem so fucked up now, does it?
At some point I didn’t have to sleep with the baby on me anymore, and sex resumed. You try to time sex stuff so it happens when your newborn is sleeping, but this can be unpredictable. The option to do it in the same room pretty much ends the minute they gain the ability to use their necks properly—forget making and retaining memories. (Because he’s a monster, my husband is fond of reminding me of the time our oldest was napping but woke up and waved to me at the worst possible time, intercourse-wise.)
So, when the fates align and my husband and I are both up for it (like if the Flyers win), we have to find someplace we won’t be disturbed. The biggest consequence of co-sleeping, as far as intimacy goes, is that unless you want to risk accidentally having sex in front of your now sentient children, which is a pass for me, you rarely get to do it in a bed. The place you also no longer get to sleep.
Boy, do I miss having sex in a bed, and without feeling like I’m being hunted. I’d love to get into “the moment” without it involving a semi-nude commando crawl toward the broom cabinet in the dark, one of us silent-screaming as a Princess Jasmine tiara sinks into our kneecap. Because—if you plan to co-sleep—you also need to find a place in your house where noise doesn’t travel. I’m talking pantries, closets, half-baths … anything that could double as a panic room in a pinch. Because that’s what it is: a place to retreat from intruders in the hopes of having an orgasm.
Bear in mind, all of the places it used to be hot to give a spontaneous blow job will have been erotically neutralized by your children. The shower? Caked with snazzleberry toothpaste and filled with ankle-spraining little sailboats and a mildewy sponge alphabet. The wall you once had sex up against? It now has a life-sized peel-and-stick Chewbacca on it. The kitchen floor? Forget it. It’s gross. If you have children and you’re also having sex, you don’t have time left to mop.
My husband and I have the occasional night away from home, where there’s no danger of anyone bursting in with sad eyes and a stuffed leopard. But they’re few and far between. Namely, because we’re broke. Because we had kids.
The most recent time we found ourselves in a king-size hotel bed with a view of the crashing ocean and those nice candles that smell like some childless person’s life, we made a late (for parents) dinner reservation at the hotel restaurant in the hope we could get back and have actual in-bed sex. In the end, we both got distracted by TBS or TNT or whatever cable channel still marathons Kevin Costner movies. We made it all the way through Field of Dreams and into some of Waterworld before we both admitted that we weren’t going to make it to the sinful hour of 7:30 P.M. and went to sleep. That night we were just more horny for a full REM cycle, and that’s O.K.
We always have the broom closet where we keep the bleach.
Julieanne Smolinski is a Los Angeles–based comedy writer
