Love In The Time of Colic
The New Parents' Guide to Getting it On Again

Welcome to the Jungle

Lights. Camera...Action?

Picture this: Mom and dad crawl into bed after finally getting the baby to sleep. For the moment, the little one is in the crib, and as much as they’d like to believe he’ll stay that way, they know it’s only a matter of time. For mom’s part, she just wants to read a few sentences of the same paragraph of the same novel she’s been mulling over and over and then close her eyes and snatch a few moments of precious sleep.

Dad, meanwhile, has other plans: he sidles on over, gently pushes away the novel and presses his body (and hard-on) against her. You’ve got to be kidding me, she thinks to herself. How can he even think of sex? There’s no way this is going to happen.

But tonight he’s determined; he won’t take her subtle back-turn as an answer. He knows he has a tiny window of time and has to act fast: maybe, just maybe, he’ll get some action: charity-sex , a blow-job, even a hand-job: hell, at this point anything other than his own hand would do. So she kisses him back, at first out of a sense of obligation. But soon, as she starts to remember long lost grown-up sensations, she does it because (what’s this) she kind of wants to! The force of his hunger puts her in touch with appetites of her own. (Maybe this guy isn’t so bad after all.) For a few precious moments they are back to being a couple—not just co-parents—with no thoughts other than each other. There is no world outside of this bedroom, no world outside of their touch.

Until the crying begins.

Although Dad has purposefully turned down the baby-monitor (a cheap ploy, he knows), the wails reverberate through the walls. He continues to kiss and grope, urging her to let the baby cry – it’s okay if he cries a little, he tries to reason, knowing in his gut it’s already a lost cause. And then he prays: please, please, please go back to sleep. For Pete’s sake, sleep.

But it’s already a fait accompli for Mom. Her whole body pulls toward the baby, her whole being is affected by his tiny little cries. She rushes up, throws on some old sweats, and soon returns to bed, cooing over the breathless baby latched to her breast. Dad knows his chance is shot. He turns away and faces the wall. Whereas minutes ago they were deeply connected, they are now a million miles apart.

Don’t be angry, she wants to say: it won’t always be like this. She reaches out to him, but he recoils at the touch, springs from the bed, and leaves the room, silently. From the bedroom, she hears him pacing and muttering under his breath. She doesn’t know whether to cry or curse him out.

Welcome to the jungle. Welcome to love in the time of colic.

Thanks to Carrie Bradshaw and company, our generation is now comfortable laughing about the big O over cosmos—and thanks to our modern metrosexual husbands, we can equally share diaper duty and hair creme. But as swinging and savvy as new parents are today, there’s still one very old-fashioned topic we just don’t know how to talk about: Sex. After. Baby.

These three words are spoken in hushed voices over play-dates and at playgrounds by mothers and fathers everywhere, stumped and shocked by the state of their sex lives. For a generation inculcated with individualism and weaned on sexual empowerment, we’re as surprised as anyone when our sex lives end up stale. But while we may whisper about it to our closest girlfriends, or make jokes after one too many beers with the guys, when it comes to talking with our partners about what’s really going on (or not going on, as the case may be) in our baby-proofed bedrooms, more and more of us find ourselves tongue tied and tip-toeing.