Kids AND Intimacy - HA!

For most of my married life, there has been a child sleeping in my bed. No, I'm not talking about my husband.

All of my children have slept with me. It started with J fifteen years ago. She got the boot when she was four, kicking and screaming all the way.

I vowed never to have a child in my bed again. Then came A. Once again, a child entered my bed. Why did a child enter my bed? I will explain.

Those of us who have given birth know that pregnancy is one of nature's little ironies. In the last month of pregnancy, when you desperately need to stock up on sleep, you can't. Your belly is too big to find a comfortable sleeping position, the minute you drift off you have to pee, you're constipated and there is a future linebacker practicing his/her kicks in your stomach. Ooh, I forgot to mention the constant sweating and hot flashes.

At the end of nine months, your sleep-deprived self gets the honor of pushing something the size of a bowling bowl out of a hole that is normally the size of a pin. If you're lucky, you get an epidural. If you're not lucky, your gd doctor shows up as the baby is crowning. This is, of course, after all attempts by the nurses to reach him on his cell phone so you can HAVE SOME SORT OF PAIN RELIEF have been unsuccessful. Oh gee, do I sound bitter?

Approximately 24 to 36 hours later you go home with your bundle of joy. Only the joy part is eluding you because you're so freaking tired. You nurse this bundle and get it to sleep. You lay it down. It wakes up crying. You nurse it to sleep AGAIN. You lay it down. It wakes up crying. This cycle continues to repeat until you are so tired you are staggering. Now you are crying! Please, some sleep would be lovely. PLEASE.

So you nurse the baby next to you in bed and you both fall asleep together. And the body heat from you keeps the baby asleep. Oh sweet bliss. And so it begins - the invasion of the marriage bed.

J slept with me. A slept in my bed. A was evicted when SJ came along. SJ is currently in my bed. It's crowded in there.

So this week I have been working on getting SJ into his own bed. I will get him to sleep, usually drifting off myself in the process. I wake up and go in my bed where I get approximately twenty minutes before he wakes up again. Either I get him down again and go to my bed for the next hour (maybe) or I give up and sleep with him. But at least he's out of my bed, right?

Two nights ago, I got him down at 9:30, woke up at 12:30, and went to my own bed. My husband came to join me and we had an actual uninterrupted CONVERSATION. It went kind of like this.

Him: "So what do you think about this whole Clinton-Lewinsky thing?"

Me: "I don't care who he sleeps with."

Him: "I think Linda Tripp was just jealous because the president wasn't slipping it to her."

Me: "I don't know why he wasn't doing Tripp. She certainly fit his criteria in the looks department."

Him: "Gee, since it's been six months and all, would you like to...?"

Voice from across hallway: "Wah!"

Okay maybe the conversation didn't go exactly like that, but it feels like it's been that long since we talked about anything but his job and poopy diapers.

I got SJ asleep again. He was up about an hour later. He reaches out to find me in the night and wakes up when I'm not there. I need a life-size Carolyn doll, but not the blow up kind.

It makes me wonder how second and third children even manage to get conceived.