Hello baby, goodbye sex life

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I don’t generally attend medical conferences. This is because a) I’m not a doctor, and b) if I have spare time, I’m going to spend it sleeping and not attending educational gatherings. If I had attended one recent medical conference, however, I would have heard a talk by a sexual anthropologist who spoke to the attendees about sex after parenthood (as opposed to, say, lawn bowls after parenthood, which would be a rather bizarre topic for a sexual anthropologist).

She suggested that up to a third of new parents may develop serious sexual dysfunction and that it can take up to six years for new parents to resume their normal sex lives – far longer than the ‘six weeks’ generally suggested by obstetricians.

So serious is the problem, the anthropologist said, doctors should be routinely asking their patients about their sex lives to pick up on issues before they become too serious.

Me, myself and I

Now, I never fell for the ‘resume sexual activities in six weeks’ myth in the first place. After pushing out my first giant baby person, sexual activities were about the last thing on my to-do list.

For one thing, everything hurt down there and I was not at all keen to test out the equipment. For another thing, if I got into bed I was likely to become unconscious in about five seconds flat and, though my husband was certainly eager to get to business, five seconds wasn’t quite long enough to get the job done.

Even more to the point, though, I was giving of myself and my body virtually every minute I was awake. I was breastfeeding and cuddling my baby and rocking him to sleep and carrying him around in a pouch. At the end of the day, I didn’t crave sexual contact with my partner. If anything, I craved some time when I could have my body all to myself.

Related: Sex after childbirth: what to expect

Will we ever get back to "normal"?

But while I wasn’t swinging from the chandeliers again in the proscribed six weeks, it didn’t take six years for my libido to return. Once the baby began sleeping through the night and my stitches began to heal, our sex life got back to normal (although ‘normal’ hadn’t previously included being interrupted by a crying child). And the proof is in the pudding: we even managed to make two more babies in the process.

Now, that’s not to say that my husband and I returned to the wild passion of our youth. We never did. But, quite frankly, we hadn’t experienced the wild passion of our youth since, well, our youth – which I suspect is probably fairly standard.

Having said that, I think it’s a fine idea for doctors to check out the sexual health of their patients. We mothers tend not to bring it up spontaneously, so it can’t hurt to ask. And the more information that we have prior to becoming parents, the better equipped we are to manage. And if it means we can predict exactly when to service the chandeliers, well, that’s even better.

Read more from Kerri at Life & Other Crises