The New Father. Armin A. Brott
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start sucking—an indication that she can now tell the difference between your finger and a milk-bearing nipple.
• She is also now able to accommodate herself to various situations. If you’re holding her upright against your shoulder, she’ll hold herself differently than if you’re resting her on your knees.
• She gets excited when she sees familiar objects, but she has no sense of “object permanence” (which means that as far as the baby is concerned, anything she can’t see simply doesn’t exist). At the same time, though, she’s developing a primitive understanding of cause and effect: when she cries, you take care of one of her needs.
Verbally
• Leaving behind the grunting and squeaking, your baby is expanding her vocabulary to include some delightful cooing (a combination of a squeal and a gurgle), as well as some impressive oohs, ohhs, and ahhs.
• Crying, however, is still one of her favorite ways of communicating and is in no way a comment on your parenting abilities.
Emotionally/Socially
• And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: your baby is finally able to smile at you (sorry, but until now those things you thought were smiles were probably just gas), which she’ll often do in response to something that pleases her.
• As she becomes more and more interested in learning about her world (a process that hopefully won’t stop for the rest of her life), your baby will really enjoy regular changes of scenery.
• Her range of emotions is still fairly small, limited mostly to excitement and distress. But she’s giving you a lot of hints about her future personality.
• She’s awake about ten hours a day. Although she’s stimulated more by touch than by social interaction, she’ll stay awake longer if there are people around to amuse her.
WHAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH
Thinking about Sex
Most OB/GYNs advise their patients to refrain from intercourse for at least six weeks after giving birth. But before you mark that date on your calendar, remember that the six-week rule is only a guideline. Resuming intercourse ultimately depends on the condition of your partner’s cervix and vagina, and, more important, on how you’re both feeling. Many couples begin having sex again in as little as three or four weeks, but it’s not at all uncommon for couples to take six months or longer to fully reestablish their prepregnancy sex life.
Many factors—both physical and psychological—influence when and how a couple decides to resume their sex life. Here are a few:
• One or both of you may be too exhausted, too stressed, or just unable to fit it into your schedule. And one or both of you might worry about being interrupted by a crying baby, which has a tendency to limit spontaneity.
• When you had sex with your partner before, she was the woman you loved. Now she’s also a mother—a thought that may remind you of your own mother and can be a big turnoff. At the same time, in your new capacity as parent, you may remind your partner a little too much of her own father. She may also find it tough to reconcile her roles as lover and mother, and may see herself as unsexual.
• Your partner may not have fully recovered from her episiotomy or C-section.
• Your partner may be embarrassed if milk leaks from her breasts when she’s aroused. A lot of men find leaking breasts erotic. But if you don’t—and she senses your feelings—she may worry that you don’t find her desirable anymore.
• A lot of women find it difficult to think of their vagina as a sexual organ after seeing a baby come out of it. And some men have trouble coping with the idea that their partner’s breasts and vagina can be functional as well as fun. And images of a vaginal birth or having the woman you love sliced open for a C-section can be hard to get out of your mind.
• You may resent your baby’s unlimited access to your partner’s breasts and feel that your partner is focusing more on the baby than on you. And she may be.
• Your (or your partner’s) motivation to have sex may have changed since your baby was born. If, for example, you or she were motivated to have sex because you really wanted to be a parent, sex after having a baby may feel a little anticlimactic, so to speak. Been there, done that.
• Now that you have concrete proof (the baby) of your virility, you may feel more intimate with your partner than ever before.
Nonsexual and Almost Nonsexual Affection
Most adults have a limited repertoire of ways to please each other. But there are plenty of ways to be sensual short of intercourse. Hand holding, back rubs, hair stroking while watching TV, and even gentle, nonsexual kissing are good for those times when one of you isn’t in the mood. If you’re not in the mood but want to give—or receive—some nonsexual affection, tell your partner up front that there are no strings attached. Researchers have found that men and women who don’t want sex are frequently afraid that the kiss or hug they need from, or want to give to, their partners will be misinterpreted as a sexual overture.
When You and Your Partner Are out of Sync
Just as you and your partner can’t always agree on what movie you want to see or what you want to have for dinner, you can’t expect that you’ll both feel sexually aroused at the same time. She might want to make love at a time when you’re simply too tired to move. Or you might want to have sex when she’s feeling “touched out,” having spent an entire day with a baby crawling all over her, sucking her breasts.
The months right after the birth of a baby are a particularly vulnerable time for your sex life. If you had great sex before or even during the pregnancy, don’t take it for granted that everything will be as it was—you’ll still have to work on it. And if your prebaby sex life wasn’t that great, don’t count on it getting better anytime soon. Either way, here are a few suggestions that might help smooth over some of the rough spots you’ll invariably encounter:
• Figure out what, exactly, is motivating you to want to have sex. That may sound ridiculous—you want to have sex because it feels good, right? Well, sort of. “Sex can be an expression of monogamy, intimacy, love, or even an affirmation of one’s sexual identity (‘I’m a man and this is what men do’),” says Linda Perlin Alperstein, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. And for some people (this is pretty rare, though) sex is solely a way to reproduce.
• Talk. Most of us—men and women—feel embarrassed to tell our partner exactly what we like and don’t like. But doing so is absolutely essential—not only to getting your sex life back on track but to the overall health of your relationship.
• Negotiate. If you really want to have sex, and she doesn’t, ask her—without putting a lot of pressure on her—what, if anything, she’d be willing to do. Would she, for example, be willing to masturbate you? Would she hold you in her arms or let you touch her breasts while you stimulate yourself? In sexuality expert Sari van Anders’s research, 58 percent of partners of new moms received oral sex. It goes without saying (or at least it should) that you should be prepared to reciprocate. The object here is not to convince her to have sex; the two of you should be working toward creating an environment in which you both feel safe expressing your desires and in which each of you can turn the other down without fear of causing offense or hurting feelings.
• Be completely honest. If you and your partner agree that you’ll hold each other like spoons and kiss but that you won’t touch each other’s genitals, don’t go over the line. Doing so will only make her tense and distrustful.
• Change your attitude. A lot of men have the idea that every erection has to result in an ejaculation. But is having an orgasm the only way to experience pleasure? Not a chance. Sometimes just getting aroused—and leaving it right there—can be fun.
• Start dating again. No, not someone else—your partner. Having a good sex life can certainly contribute to the happiness of your relationship, but even the wildest,