After my son was born, I had sex once. It was on his first birthday, and after that, I didn’t again until he was 5. A lot of people are shocked when I tell them that. If you’re an adult who doesn’t have regular sex, especially if you have a kid, people never know what to make of it. But I was a single mom, and honestly, it’s wasn’t something that I planned. Taking care of my son was more of a priority for me at the time.
Honestly, sex was never that important to me. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something I couldn’t live without. My friends couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I didn’t miss it after becoming a mom. After a while, I even questioned why I wasn’t interested. It took time, but then I began to put things together in my mind. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in sex, it’s just that I wasn’t interested in men. Motherhood wasn’t the thing that killed my desire, heterosexuality was. Once I came out of the closet, my entire relationship to sex changed.
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I had been in a relationship with the same person for a long time, and that relationship ended.
The last time I had sex with a man — my son’s father, was one of the least enjoyable sexual experiences I’ve ever had. Our relationship was complicated at that point, but it wasn’t the emotions that made the experience less than stellar. My body was different. I had gotten an IUD inserted eight weeks postpartum, and pairing that with breastfeeding, my body just didn’t react to stimulation the same way. I was dry, and the constant friction of intercourse hurt so much that I squeezed my eyes closed and just waited for it to be over.
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Motherhood changed my relationship to myself in a lot of ways.
When my son was a toddler, I was a single mom and we were living with my parents. I was so focused on working and raising a toddler, I couldn’t even fathom the idea of being in a relationship or having sex. My son was still extremely needy and breastfeeding on demand, so I was essentially sharing my body with him. Breastfeeding is a symbiotic relationship, even if you create boundaries around it. You are still sharing parts of yourself with someone else. Between breastfeeding and trying to raise a child by myself, I didn’t even recognize myself. There were moments that I would look at myself in the mirror and ask “Who is this woman?”
Several of my friends kept trying to push me towards the idea of seeking out a sexual relationship with someone. Usually I would shut down the topic, claiming that my living situation and the stress of being a single mom simply took up too much of my time and energy. With all of that going on, how could I possibly find the time to let another person take up space in my world? They saw it as an excuse, but that was actually a very large part of why I kept putting off having sex again. And, the changes that motherhood had brought to my body were also a factor I didn’t feel confident sharing with them.
My jeans hugged different contours of my body; my tummy was a lot softer and rounder. And thanks to breastfeeding, my breasts were uneven. I didn’t want a man to see me naked. Even though I was only in my early 30s, I knew that men my age weren’t lining up to date a single mom when they could date a 22-year-old whose body was still tight and cute.
I had a lot of emotional growing and changing to do before I could feel whole again.
I don’t regret any of the choices I made during that time. Choosing to focus on raising my son and ignore sex was the right thing for me. If people couldn’t understand that, I didn’t have the time or desire to explain it to them. Plus, it wasn’t any of their business anyway. Things were working for us, and that was all that mattered.
Around the time my son turned 4, things started to change. I had stopped breastfeeding and was beginning to reconnect to myself as an individual again. And while sex wasn’t the first thing on my mind, I was beginning to contemplate dating again in the not too distant future. But there was always something that stopped me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I had never considered that my sexuality was the answer to my problem.
While I had been in a relationship with a man throughout my 20s, I had figured out that I was attracted to women when I was 12. After having my son, inklings of that attraction started coming back. I paid more attention to the female sexual pairings on the show Orange is the New Black than the other people I watched it with.
There were women who got more than a passing glance when I saw them on the street or in a magazine. I started to notice more the curve of a woman’s body, the way it sparked a desire in me that looking at an attractive man didn’t.
Changing my idea of who found me sexually desirable changed how I saw myself.
In June 2018, I decided to pull the trigger and download a couple of dating apps. But I knew that if I was going to take the plunge, I wanted to try dating women. Dating for the first time in 10 years was jarring, but there was something really natural about dating women.
The first woman I had sex with was also a mom. We could commiserate over the ways that childbirth and breastfeeding had changed our bodies. After that conversation, I wasn’t afraid to let her see me naked. In fact, for the first time, I felt empowered by the ways being a mother had changed my body. Having sex with someone who could appreciate the changes and find them sexy, began to alter the way I viewed my body. And that changed the way I felt about sex.
Then I met the person who changed everything.
I met the woman who is now my wife, almost five years ago. There were women before her, but from the moment we met, I knew she was different. Me being a mother was one of the things that she found most desirable about me. The softness that motherhood created in my body was something that she celebrated. She didn’t bat an eye at my uneven, saggy breasts. In fact, she couldn’t keep her hands off of them. Through her eyes, I could fully step into myself as a sexual being.
Shortly after we began dating, COVID-19 hit and everything locked down. Being stuck in the house paired with a string of life changes has yet again altered my body. But she still finds me incredibly sexy, regardless of the extra 20 pounds or cottage cheese thighs. I know my body will never look like it did before I had my son. And thanks to my wife, I don’t care.
