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.