Having Sex After Giving Birth With Stitches

SEX 

Well, obviously there won't be any of that. The very thought. Go and stick it in a tree. Bloody hell, you're lucky still to be in the same bed.

Having Sex After Giving Birth With Stitches

In the weeks immediately after the birth, this won't matter. You will be far too tired to have sex with anyone, even yourself. Your beloved may have trouble sitting down. You wouldn't want her stitches to burst at the wrong moment. Before her memories fade (as biology dictates) your beloved will vividly remember how painful and humiliating the birth was and whose fault it was.
 
But three or four months later? If she had a bad delivery she may be still be sore. Also, breastfeeding can reduce a woman's libido. And much of the time she is exhausted and wants to be left alone. Unfortunately your ears are going purple and you are breathing so heavily your teeth are in danger of coming loose. You have three choices:
 
(a) Extra-marital affair. Though expensive and usually self-defeating, this is the option selected by many first-time fathers with purple ears. Unfortunately, the drink that dulls the guilt that enables them to do it in the first place also makes them liable to forget or fudge the issue of contraception. Result: more babies. You may love being a father, but probably not that much.

(b) Self-abuse. According to New Scientist magazine (which I must read more often) regular masturbators are 33 per cent less likely to fall prey to aggressive prostate cancer later in life. (Regular is defined here as five tugs a week or more.) 10,000 British men a year are killed by prostate cancer. So, lack of sex may not be the end of everything. Indeed, it may give you the chance to extend your life without sex by several decades.

(c) Stick it in a tree. Brace and bit are available from all good hardware stores. Trees are available from all good forests. Have fun.

Jealousy 

This may or may not be connected to the Sex problem. Less frivolously, it may cut to the very heart of your relationship with of your child. Many men feel fantastically jealous of the relationship between mother and child - especially if the child is a boy. He has supplanted you in her affections. She loves him more than you. She wouldn't notice now if you dropped dead at her feet. All the above are true, but it's up to you how you respond to it.
 
Much depends on how good your relationship was before the baby came along. Men who have got used to being looked after by indulgent motherly women who are always cooking tend to come off worst here. Given a real baby, indulgent motherly women change their focus. The bloke is left to wonder where his next meal is coming from. She will let him back into her bed eventually, but only to make more babies. She doesn't even tell him off any more - not the way she used to.
 
Men who thought they had found their soulmate or compadre - well, they tend to come off worst as well. It may be that such men didn't particularly want children because they felt everything was as good as it could be. Their soulmate persuades them otherwise. So they go through pregnancy, birth, vomit and sleeplessness before realizing that they were right all along. A tough call.
 

Easiest of all is if you felt only mild affection for your partner, and couldn't give a monkeys whether or not she prefers her child to you. But you can't fake this. Indifference, like true love, has to be sincere. If you have to work at it, you've got no hope. To find out more, you can check out Having Sex After Giving Birth With Stitches.

Baby Growth First 6 Months

The first months of parenthood can pass in a bit of a fug. 'Fug off,' you shout at your partner after a particularly bad night. Meanwhile, the infant continues to grow and develop at an alarming rate. 

One month old: can hold its head up about an inch when lying on stomach.

Baby Growth First 6 Months

 
Two months: can lift its head to 45 degrees when on stomach. Otherwise, still as floppy as an inadequately stuffed soft toy.

Three months: can lift shoulders. And turn its head when it hears your voice, and express pleasure by waving arms and kicking legs. Can keep head up steadily now for a few seconds.

Four months: can sit up. But only if you put it in the sitting position and hold it there. Can also cross its feet, and will start reaching for its toes. Which are currently too far away.

Five months: can push up on its arms for about a second and a half. Then clump! hits the floor and bursts into tears. Also starting to put things in its mouth. Full control of head.
 
Six months: can sit up without support. For about a second and a half. Then roils over, hits the floor and bursts into tears. Can hold its bottle or beaker, transfer small things from one hand to another, take telephone messages, vacuum the carpet.

This may not seem like particularly swift progress, and compared to most animals it isn't. By the time they are six months old many farm animals have already been eaten. But if you are watching your child develop from day to day, every small step he or she makes feels like a giant leap for mankind.
 
Most days bring something new, even it's only a particular look on Junior's face when you are trying to change a nappy. Needless to say you become enthralled by all this and can't stop yourself telling everyone about it. The system works well, for while the parents are congratulating themselves on every tiny new skill their baby acquires, Junior is actually concentrating on his or her core activities: eating, farting, pissing, shitting, vomiting, gurgling, wriggling, making silly noises, crying, sleeping, failing to sleep and (if you are lucky) looking adorable. Not to mention growing. Compare a four-month-old child with a newborn and they seem like different species. A twelve-month-old is incomprehensibly huge. Baby's priorities are clear: size first, skills later.
 
And how about you, six months down the line? How are you feeling? I believe it takes most fathers at least four months after the birth to remember that they are still alive. (It may take them longer to stop wishing they were dead, but that's another matter.)

Scarcely recognizing the elderly heavy metal vocalist in the mirror in the morning, you may start to take stock of the situation. We must try not to generalize too much here: by six months babies are already demonstrating an extraordinary variety of behavior patterns and personality traits. Some parents will now be past the worst, while others will still be knee deep in it, and finding it impossible to wash off in the shower every morning. 

What should be apparent, though, is that mentally and spiritually, Junior is now very much with us. Very tiny babies have a slightly unworldly quality - 'trailing clouds of glory', as Wordsworth put it. They are in the world, but not quite of it yet. Some cultures believe that their spirits join us only gradually, from wherever they were before. (Before fatherhood I couldn't have read that sentence without laughing, let alone written it. After two children, I can almost see what they mean.) 

But by six months the mind is fully engaged, and your baby is lying there just as you or I would be, wondering idly where the next meal is coming from. You, of course, have rather more to worry about. To find out more, you can check out Baby Growth First 6 Months.

 

Responsible Fatherhood Program

It is easy to lose sight of this. You are at work all day, you come home, the baby is screaming and the place is a sty. Your partner expects you to muck in immediately, not because she is unreasonable (although she may very well be) but because she is knackered and desperately needs some time off. The daily transition you must make from work life (ordered, remunerated) to domestic life (chaotic, cripplingly expensive) is a difficult one to handle, not just for you but for your partner as well. It can become a flashpoint of pent-up resentment. Don't be surprised by this. Even the most easy-going men struggle to adjust to the sheer mundanity of childcare. A lot of it is catastrophically dull.

Responsible Fatherhood Program

Mothers have more hours in the day to get used to it, but that doesn't mean they do. There have been several books recently by writer-mothers, all of them highly intelligent and accomplished women, who have clearly loathed the relentless treadmill of parenthood. It may be that the cleverest and most career-oriented women find it most difficult to adjust to the drudgery of it all. 

My girlfriend, who is also highly intelligent and accomplished, nonetheless believes you need to have a certain in-built bovine quality to get the most out of it. Although this could be her way of explaining why, when breastfeeding our two, she so often went 'Moo.'

Something similar applies to fathers. I think the only way you can make sense of the drudgery is to surrender to it completely. Because it does not last forever, and your children will be happier and more secure when they are older if you have been there, doing what needs to be done. Once you surrender to it, you might not actually enjoy it, but you won't resent it as much, either. Sometimes you are barely aware of it. Just the other day I realized that I had wiped three arses in the preceding 15 minutes, only one of them my own.
 
Human babies, of course, need more parental care than any other species: this is a direct consequence of our awesome evolutionary success. Other primates have only maternal care, but somewhere along the line humans started to fall in love, or 'pairbond' as anthropologists would have it, and so paternal care became available, too. Our children simply need a lot of looking after, and a mother can only do so much. When we all lived in tribes there was an extended family to help out. No longer, of course. Grandparents, increasingly, are on the other side of the country, if not the other side of the world. You could almost say that we have evolved to a point at which fathers are more important than ever before, not less important.
 
Two parents of different sexes also supply a certain variety. Men and women are different. Women have observed this empirically and men have proved it scientifically. So having one of each around the house means a full set of gender role models from whom the child can learn how to live its life. Here's a strange but, I think, fascinating example. Mothers, in the earliest weeks of new life, tend to carry or sit holding their baby face to face. Fathers, by contrast, usually hold the baby so that it is facing out into the world. Subconsciously, say psychologists, the father sees it as his job to introduce the baby to the world. Most men do this without realizing. It is one instinct we do not have to learn.
 
Your primary function is to Be There. It may not sound like much but it is too much for some. In the USA, whose social trends we tend to follow as though index-linked, 36 per cent of children live apart from their biological fathers. Of these, 40 per cent haven't seen those fathers in a year or more. We now know that children brought up by one parent are more likely as they grow up to do badly at school, suffer from depression, commit crimes. This isn't necessarily because single mothers are no good at their job; it's because the father-shaped hole in a young life can be difficult, even impossible, to fill.

So if you do look in the mirror from time to time and think, 'Mm. You're OK,' that is no bad thing, and it may even be true. As one recent academic book on the subject put it, with unacademic pithiness, 'Parenting is an ordinary everyday activity, and yet it is also one of the most skilled, difficult and demanding tasks an adult is called upon to perform.' You might as well give yourself credit for this, as no one else will. To find out more, you can check out Responsible Fatherhood Program.

 

The Priceless Purpose Of Fatherhood

Where is the truth in all this? In October 2002 the Equal Opportunities Commission published a report in which it neatly divided British fathers into four distinct categories. Enforcer Dad is the old-fashioned stereotype: he sets the rules, but is no involved in day-to-day care. Enforcer Dad shouts a lot and, in nineteen-century novels, wore a black frock coat. He kisses his children only on birthdays and Christmas Day and even then reluctantly, as he would rather 'toughen them up'. Enforcer Dad's dad was an Enforcer Dad - but I think you already knew that.

The Priceless Purpose Of Fatherhood

Category Two is Entertainer Dad, who is good at amusing the kids but useless at everything else. Does not help around the house, avoids having to discipline anyone, but great fun at parties, to which he wears a revolving bow-tie. Most mothers want Entertainer Dad killed, and may hire someone to do it.
 
Then we have Useful Dad, who does his bit domestically and regularly looks after the kids, but always defers to the authority of his partner. He sees himself as helping her out, rather than taking responsibility for things himself. The Equal Opportunities Commission nearly approves of Useful Dad, but not quite.

Finally, there is Fully Involved Dad, who is 'equally involved in running the home and family' says the report. He does more than his fair share of everything, can cook to cordon bleu standard and is dynamite in the sack, with the fingers of a concert pianist, a tongue that could lift weights and the lung control of an Olympic swimmer. The EOC likes Fully Involved Dad a lot. The rest of us are going round to his house now to kick him.

What a choice! Any father reading this rubbish would become profoundly depressed, although in reality most of us combine all these stereotypes in various proportions. We are all probably a combination of Entertainer and Useful, and little though we may wish to admit it, have a smidgen of Fully Involved too. We are Slightly Fully Involved. I suspect you have to be a bit touchy-feely if you are going to be any good at fathering. Most of us probably are, naturally and spontaneously, without thinking about it. We are all NEW Men now, after a fashion.
 
YOU STILL HAVEN'T ANSWERED MY QUESTION 

Yes, impressive, isn't it? But it isn't an easy one to answer. We on see clearly what the mother is for. She is likely to be what social workers call 'the primary carer'. She has these breasts which solve 90 per cent of known infancy problems. She seems to have nurturing instincts that most men, quite simply, lack. We have to learn everything, and however hard we try we never seem to be quite there. This can be hugely frustrating. 

As men we are used to being at the centre of everything, so to be shoved out here on the margins, watching our child's earliest weeks and months at one remove, can be dispiriting, not to mention demotivating. More often that not, the arrival of a child drastically reduces family income, so the father finds himself working harder to make up the difference. Gravity weakens the further you are away from an object. And as the father drifts off, in some cases never to be seen again, the newly single mother says, 'What use are fathers anyway?'

I am not going to demonise single mothers. Frightened and angry people do this already in certain newspapers. My mother was a single mother for a while; my girlfriend's mother was a single mother for rather longer. They are both splendid and impressive people, for whom life has at times been a struggle. They would rather not have been single mothers - not because society might disapprove (who cares about that?), but because bringing us and our siblings up was grindingly hard work. As if it's not tough enough for two parents. But this is my point: if the father has any function at all, it is to Be There. Looking after a baby's grindingly hard work, and it helps if there is more than one person around to do it. Simply by taking part do you justify your existence. To find out more, you can check out The Priceless Purpose Of Fatherhood.

First Time Fatherhood

Most mothers won't care to hear any of this. As far as they are concerned, you always had the easier share of the pregnancy, in that you did nothing at all. Now that the baby is born, chances are that she is stuck at home, greasy-haired with stress and rage, while you swan off to work every morning, for what she regards as a jolly day out. 
 

First Time Fatherhood

If you are the sole breadwinner, as many men are, it does not matter that you have to worry about money or accommodation or the increasing likelihood that you will get sacked because your work is so poor because you never get any sleep at night. Your partner's eyes will glaze over long before you finish explaining. 

The following morning she will sit in a cafe eating cakes with other new mothers and they will ask each other, with sighs of infinite weariness, 'What use are fathers anyway?'  

WELL, WHAT USE ARE FATHERS ANYWAY? 

That is a very good question and I am very pleased you have asked it.
 
GO ON.
 
Yes, I am very pleased you have asked it, it being a very good question.

THANK YOU, BUT DO YOU INTEND TO ANSWER IT AT SOME POINT? 

I'd love to. But we fathers sometimes have a problem justifying our existence, beyond the obvious roles of provider, uncomplaining domestic slave, chauffeur and reader of bedtime stories with copious use of silly voices. Lesbians solved the problem decades ago with a turkey baster - so efficiently, in fact, that turkey basters now need a new name, as virtually no one uses them to baste turkeys any more. (Heterosexual women use them only to wield at their menfolk, while saying things like 'This would be more use than you are.') 

The absolute uselessness of men generally, and fathers specifically, has become a cornerstone of our popular culture, assumed to be true of us all unless we can individually prove otherwise. The Maternity Alliance - which sounds a terrifying organization, possibly paramilitary in outlook - published a useful pamphlet in 2000 called And Baby Makes Three: A Man's Guide To Becoming A Father. 'It is hard to find media portrayals ... that are heroic about fathers,' it said, accurately. 'Instead you get a load of unimpressive stereotypes:

• fathers work too hard and neglect their children.
• fathers abandon their families and refuse to pay maintenance.
• fathers are too ham-fisted to change a nappy properly. 
• fathers are distant, uncaring authority figures. 
• fathers are people with comic dress sense who like pottering in garden sheds. 
• fathers are like big kids: another person for the mother to look after.' 

This makes depressing reading for men, although being men, we all have to tot up and see how many of them apply to us. I declare here that none of them apply to me, although I admit I'd probably score one out of six if I possessed a garden shed. My girlfriend says I score two out of six with or without the shed. Thinking back a generation, I realize that my father scored an easy three, so however you look at it, I represent an improvement.

But it's never as simple as that. If these old-fashioned notions of fatherhood now seem ridiculous, what has replaced them can inspire even fiercer hostility. The touchy-feely New Man stereo type gives many of us the collywobbles, partly because it seems to represent someone so in touch with their feminine side that their masculine side has disappeared completely. 

This is the sort of man who will have willingly put on an Empathy Belly when his partner was pregnant. He will have been brilliant at the birth, massaging her shoulders until his thumbs had worn down to stumps, and taking her abuse on the chin without complaint. I hate him and I want to kick him, and so do most of the fathers I spoke to, even if he doesn't actually exist. To find out more, you can check out First Time Fatherhood.

 

Importance Of Fatherhood

Within the first 40 days parents are required to register their baby's birth. This is easily dealt with. To find out where your nearest Registrar of Births is, phone your local council or ask your midwives. If you are married, only one of you needs to go along. If you are not, you must both be there in glowing Technicolor.

Importance Of Fatherhood

Three other things you need to remember: (a) your passports, (b) your hospital paperwork and (c) your baby. The registrar will look carefully at the first two and slightly more fleetingly at the third. Does baby have your ears? And her nose? Really, the registrar couldn't care less. It's his day off tomorrow and he can't decide whether to go fishing or visit prostitutes. Within the blink of an eye the significant forms are filled in and, for a small fee, you get a birth certificate and the reassuring feeling that your baby is now officially alive.

It also means that you are now a Registered Dad. If at some time in the future you are savagely murdered by lunatics or injured in a wholly preventable train crash, newspapers will refer to you as a 'father-of-one'. By creating life you have unwittingly become a person of consequence. You are a parent. According to many people's prejudices, that makes you a pillar of the community. From there it's but a short step to fat bastard, pompous old fool and desperate, pitiable dirty old man.
 
Still, all communities need their pillars, if only to chop them down. In your new role you will do many things you could never have imagined doing before all this crept up on you. These include:

• Going out to the shops to buy Tupperware.
• Willingly going to bed at 9.30 in the evening.
• Eyeing up women as potential mothers as well as bed partners. 
• Waiting at a pedestrian crossing until the light goes green instead of nipping across when there's a break in the traffic. 
• Sticking your nose right up against your child's arse to check whether or not there's a poo in there. 

(This latter one is best performed in public places, for the satisfying reactions you'll receive from passers-by. All women will approve; some may even tell you to your face. Several men won't even notice, because they do the same thing every day themselves. Others will grimace or retch. They are not man enough to inhale closely from a baby's bum. You are.) 

You may also spend some time wondering exactly what it means to you to be a father. At this stage, mothers are generally too sore and exhausted to think too much about being a mother. Being women, they have been thinking about it for years, anyway. They have also endured nine months of pregnancy, which tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Whereas most of us spend that time not thinking about anything at all if we can help it. It is the fate of fathers always to be slightly behind the game. Walking down the street, we wonder whether we are walking in a slightly more, well, fatherly way. Is there such a thing? Do people treat you differently? Do you feel different? 

If so, that's probably as it should be. Remarkably, given the incidence of postnatal depression among fathers, all the research shows that becoming a father can actually do wonders for your self-esteem. You look in the mirror in the morning and think, Hey! you're all right. No, you're better than right. You're a-fucking-mazing. (Make sure you are only thinking this rather than saying it out loud.)
 

In the long run, you may be surprised and pleased to hear, fathers seem to do rather well out of family life. Studies show that, while women often feel equivocal about motherhood, fatherhood just makes men happier. That patina of seriousness you always lacked; well you've got it now. And then there's the most fundamental truth of all: your equipment works. You have cojones. The proof lives with you and probably has your surname. This knowledge is a wonderful thing, and the glorious smugness that now resides in your manly chest is something that, you will be delighted to hear; time will never erode, not even a little bit. To find out more, you can check out Importance Of Fatherhood.