By Emilie Fabrin
On February 9, 2018, the sight of two tiny red lines on a pregnancy test changed my entire life. From that moment on, my body wasn't just my own, it also belonged to a little fetus inside me I still didn't know. It actually changed everything. It changed my eating habits and sleep routines, it changed my hormones and my mood, it changed my physical ability. And then it changed the sexual dynamic in my and my boyfriend's relationship, and my own relationship with my sexuality, first for the worse, or at least for the more complicated, and then for the better.
Impossible to relax
My sex drive disappeared like dew before the sun the second a sperm fertilized an egg in my body, and it continued like that almost throughout my pregnancy (and a long time after, lets be honest). I very rarely wanted to have sex with myself, or to have sex with my boyfriend, which was really difficult for both of us. But I just had. not. bright When we finally did have sex, I worried about irrational things like my boyfriend's cock pushing the baby and somehow messing up the pregnancy in my uterus, or that colostrum would slosh like a snotty mass from my breasts down on my boyfriend's chest during a horse ride.
It made it almost impossible to relax and enjoy intercourse, and it made my desire for sex even more vanishingly small. During my pregnancy my body had changed, it looked different, it felt different, both inside and out, and I think it especially became clear to me in sexual contexts that everything felt strange and somehow uncomfortable.
During my pregnancy and in the time after the birth, I actually took great care of my round, soft, growing, and then bleeding, milk-producing and sweating body. I was proud of it and what it accomplished all by itself. But I had a really hard time reconciling it with the sexual side of me, it was like it didn't really fit together. My sexuality was packed into a shoebox and put under a bed.
When my oldest child was six months old, I suddenly had a positive pregnancy test again. I want to write that we almost didn't have sex yet before I was pregnant again, but we must have had some kind of penetrating sex, since the sperm and egg multiplied again in me. The time with tiny children was for me, and to some extent still is, an enormously physically demanding period. Not in the muscle building way, but in the "if-more-demands-more-of-my-body-today-I-throw-up" kind of way. I had a child on me more or less constantly around the clock. If I wasn't breastfeeding, I was climbed on, slept on or sat on. And when I finally saw, late at night, my back turned to a sleeping child in a bedside crib, a still-moist nipple sticking out, I looked into a pair of questioning eyes, hungry for physical contact and to feel me. It was understandable, my boyfriend's love language is physical contact, and his tank was constantly resoundingly empty. It was honest and loving, but it made me almost sick and claustrophobic.
Touched out
I remember the first time I heard the term "touched out", which describes just that, feeling overstimulated and overwhelmed by almost constant touching. I wanted to cry at the feeling of recognition, and knowing I wasn't the only one who felt this way; it was "a thing". And it was real and in order. But add, it was difficult. I was robbed of my own sense of needing physical contact, and my desire to be together intimately, because my boyfriend always got ahead of me, and because my children had overflowed my container all day. Some translate being "touched out" as having a spat, and even though the translation is a little strange, it is not entirely wrong. I could get all spat, or sneer, if someone just initiated a hug. I ended up overstepping my boundaries because I felt that my family had the first right to my body and that it was more important that their needs be met than that my boundaries be set. It was really hard for me to navigate. When enough was enough, and I typically couldn't tell until after it was way too late.
Loving boundaries
As my children grew older and more independent, and as my need to have my body to myself eventually screamed louder than my stubborn 3-year-old ever managed, the urge to dust off the shoebox and find myself sexually again grew. I experienced that the more boundaries I set, loving boundaries, both towards children and my boyfriend, the more I was allowed to feel myself and my desire, and this had a great self-reinforcing effect for me. I can clearly remember my huge upswing, when for the first time, in what felt like half a lifetime, I thought "fuck, I want to bang today". I bought my first real, good vibrator as the ultimate self-indulgence and felt like masturbating again, which gave me a good sense of ownership over my body and my sexuality. I needed to win it back before I could properly offer it to my boyfriend.
I slowly transferred the care I had had for my pregnant, giving birth, postpartum body to my new body, and I wanted to make extra efforts for that body to have delicious sex filled with good boundaries and greedy orgasms. I learned that setting boundaries meant a lot to my own sexuality to grow and flourish, and that it resulted in even better sex when I actually had it because I really wanted to and was "skin hungry".
Most of all, I would say that it has taken time. Time and patience, and it has been a journey I had to take alone. It has taken time to land in the role of mother, with all that entails. Time to land in my new body, time to rediscover myself sexually and time to unite the caring, educational mother with the one who likes a hard, flat hand against sweaty buttocks. They can easily coexist in the perfect symbiosis that is me.
