Celebrate your child's love of learning

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Dad on a Lark

It's Friday, our daughter Larkin's first birthday. Molly's home from work, we're racing around getting ready to drive to her mother's for a little party. All afternoon I've been in typical stay-at-home-dad mode, paying bills, finishing some work, making phone calls, playing with the Lark. Now it's almost 5, and guess what, we're running late.

It's the usual madness. Pack up Larkin's food, get the birthday cake out to the car, find the camera (a photo of her in a party hat? — priceless!) And where are those bills I put out for mailing? And do we have more diapers? All we're trying to do is leave, but you'd think we were launching the space shuttle. Meanwhile, Larkin bangs away at her Exersaucer, broadcasting the little duck-and-dog sounds and melodies that have colonized our minds for months.

Finally we stand by the back door and catch our breath, ready to go. "Did we forget anything?" Molly asks.
"Sex," I say.
"Huh?" She looks around.
"Sex," I repeat. "We forgot sex."

Back when it was just the two of us — and it was the two of us for a long time, almost twelve years — we worried that our sex life might take a hit once we had a child. We read an article in Newsweek reporting that a quarter of American marriages are "clinically sexless." Saw friends' marriages in which fun with the kids was rampant, but the erotic flame had flickered dangerously low. Then came the process (in our case, arduous) of trying to get pregnant. Calendar sex, ovulation kits, the whole hijinks with the specimen cup: a fertility problem turns eros into its opposite, work. Family life was going to be a lot of work, too. We both knew the old saw about all work and no play. But that wouldn't happen to us, right?

Well. Lets just say that Jack has been a very dull boy for a long while now. Jill isn't too sharp, either.

What happens to sex in new parenthood? There are so many culprits. The lack of sleep, and the shoddy quality of what sleep you do get. The lack of privacy. There was a stretch when every time Molly and I tried to get something going, the bedside monitor would flicker and Larkin would start howling in outrage — as if, having created Our Little Masterpiece, we were supposed to stop painting altogether! Then the lack of time, the need to plan every hour of every day. Are we supposed to schedule our trysts the way we set up service appointments for the car? There is a necessary indolence to sex. But we're way too busy to be lazy.

Family life is lovely, and joyful, hectic of course. And funny. But sexy? Suddenly all our conversations were about latching, and poopies, and milky time, and swaddling, and Dr. Karp's magical five-S's for quieting your screaming baby, and myself sniffing Larkin's bulging diaper while inquiring, "Oooo, are we splatty for Daddy?"

This is not sexy talk.

Then there's the problem of, well, competition for the equipment, encapsulated in Molly's refrain, I want my breasts back! Meaning 1) for herself; and 2) in their pre-nursing condition, please. As I have often announced, I want them back, too. Not to own them or anything. Just, you know, to steer them back my way once in a while. But something strange happens as you hover over your wife's breast, and...the face of your baby looms in your mind's eye. Remember the aversion you once felt, thinking about your parents having sex? Well, here it is again, upside down. You're trying to have sex, but thinking about your baby.

Finally, in addition to all the other impediments, there's a subtler, internal obstacle. Call it the challenge of cuddly. Larkin's cute little diapered butt, clothed in a yellow sleeper. The thrill of her smile. The three of us waltzing in the living room as The Proclaimers sing "Sunshine on Leith." Being a new parent involves a reallocation, perhaps even a transformation, of erotic resources. The soft and rounded crowds out the edgy and hard. Where you once felt sexy, you now feel sweet.

There are plenty of moments in the first year of parenthood when panic sets in and one or the other of you bursts out with some self-pitying lament — Will we ever sleep again? Will we ever make love again? — that inevitably triggers the universal new-parent wail: Will we ever have a life again? Sometimes humor helps you deal. Over Thanksgiving, Molly, a high school English teacher, had five days off. She gloated, thinking about all she could do. "Maybe," she said, "we can even make love."

I affected a puzzled frown. "Do we have a manual for that?" In the pantry we keep a big stack of instruction manuals for all our household gadgets. "You know, to remind us how it works."

But we haven't forgotten, not really. Haven't forgotten the sexy playfulness of a morning when Molly confided a very racy dream involving the two of us and Charlize Theron ("Doing what?" I asked, and she bashfully answered, "Oh, all sorts of things!"). Or the week we spent at the cabin in the woods in Maine, when we were new together and were passionate everywhere and all the time. The change in our family geometry may involve some redefinition of our erotic selves. But that's doable. Redefinition, after all, is part of what having children is about. It helps to have faith in one another. Perseverance. A sense of the absurd. We'll figure it out.

It's 9 PM when we get home from Larkin's birthday party, and we're happy and tired. Too tired? I will let modesty draw a veil across the answer. Suffice it to say that we never found that manual in the pantry, and yet somehow the gadget still works.