AMY GERARD: 'After 3 kids, I lost my sex drive for years. Here's how I got it back.'

The following is an extract from Strap Yourself In by Amy Gerard, available here.

Expectation: Once you pop, you can’t stop!

Reality: Three kids later and it’s like throwing a sausage down a hallway

I’ll spare you all the stories of my sex-filled teens and twenties, but I have never been one to shy away from the topic of sex — even more so since having kids. It’s almost laughable what happened to my libido after each baby cannonballed out of me, and I’m determined to normalise it and make sure it’s spoken about more often.

My first pregnancy sent my libido into overdrive and when I wasn't storming through the front door and demanding my husband Rhian enter me, I was hiding in the toilets at work masturbating. It sounds a little concerning typing that out, but the urges were intense and if I didn't see to them I wasn't able to think of anything else. It was like my vagina had blue balls every day and needed a release. Surely that's happened to someone else in pregnancy. Anyone?

After having Charli and transitioning from only having to look after myself to caring for a tiny newborn, everything changed. We waited for the standard six weeks to pass and for my check-up with the GP to make sure my tearing had healed and things were looking slightly less chaotic downstairs before having sex again. I remember the first time we had sex after having Charli I burst into tears halfway through it because it brought up some pretty heavy emotions and feelings. The truth was, there wasn't a single part of me that wanted to have sex for myself. But I wanted to do it for Rhian. I wanted him to know that I hadn't forgotten about his existence and that I loved being intimate with him, but after having an entire human exit the same hole his wiener was now trying to enter, the panic just flooded in and it sucked. Let's try again in another few weeks, I thought.

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But our sex life was put on the backburner for months and months because I had a newborn whom I was told to wake up and feed every two hours. I didn't even know what time of day it was, let alone where my clit was located. There were parts of me that were acutely aware that we hadn't been intimate in quite some time and I would sometimes feel bad, but those feelings were quickly overridden by my utter exhaustion. I had nothing to give in the bedroom and so, where I could, I would show affection in other ways. We would sit on the couch together and hold hands. We had a sleeping position that we nicknamed P1 (I still don't really know why) where Rhian would hold open his arm for me and I'd curl up into his armpit. There was lots of P1. Lots of forehead kisses and holding hands for the first year of Charli's life while our sex life was slow. And when we did manage to get going, it wasn't remotely adventurous and I needed to use at least a litre of lube because breastfeeding had made me drier than a Christmas tree in March.

It appeared the horny demon inside me had left my body. Not only did I never really feel like sex but I just didn’t have those arousing urges anymore. When I was pregnant with Bobby, I became pretty much asexual and Rhian entered into an unofficial partnership with Pornhub. I was so perplexed by how different my body felt that I remember trying to watch porn one day to get myself off, and even though I almost started a friction fire on my clit, I just couldn't get there. WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING? I knew this vessel so well. I knew exactly what to do to get her purring and yet here I was, drier than a desert lizard, with a libido that had clearly packed up its shit and left for a vacation to Mexico. I don't blame it; Mexico is a vibe. But where did that leave me and my still super-horny husband?

By the time we had our third child, Kobe, my body felt almost foreign to me. I remember the first time Rhian and I had sex after having Kobe's thirty-eight-centimetre head hovering at my hole's entrance for almost an hour. I felt hollow inside. Like all my organs had been pushed out of the way to house the big baby I made. I was basically a cave. I needed a little grace period to let things slowly adjust and retract back into place. Plus I had loads of incontinence issues to work out before I could have Rhian's sausage lobbed inside me.

Watch: How are women having sex? The juiciest results from the Mamamia Sex Survey. Post continues after video.

Besides, with three very small children, I had the sex drive of a potato. Gone were the days where I would happily jump in the back seat of a car and sit on Rhian’s lap. You couldn’t have paid me money to have sex anywhere that was remotely uncomfortable. Or cold. Or that required me to take off all my clothes. I turned into something of a starfish. I would still put out here and there — and once we were having sex, it always felt good. It was just that the feeling of wanting it had completely disappeared. For four years I put myself last, looking after the needs of my three kids first, and I just didn't have it in me to wax Rhian's sword.

Navigating a sex life with your partner when there are kids involved is tricky. It’s something that takes time and simply can't be rushed. When you don’t want sex, you need to communicate exactly that. You also need to make space for your partner to communicate what they are missing. If he wanted to go to pound town multiple times a week, then I'd be flipping the bird and asking him to come back with a more reasonable request. But please know that, just as parenting small kids is a season, so is the roller-coaster ride that is your sex life. There can be so many exhilarating moments, but you can also find yourself suddenly stuck at the top of a hill due to a mechanical issue. When you've had a tough day parenting small kids, the last thing you want to do is feign interest in a bulging penis staring directly at you.

Sex is also such an emotional thing for me. Not only did the physical touching stop for me but the resentment built up, and those free-flowing conversations became a thing of the past. I would have been far more inclined to want to jump Rhian's bones if he had helped me bring in the washing and then sat down and we'd just had a chat. About anything. I want to talk to my partner and feel like I'm being heard. When he was working long hours and I was three kids deep, intimacy would fall in the 'just couldn’t be fucked' basket.

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If you're lucky, your libido might have only taken off to New Zealand for a ski season, then returned after a few months. Mine had well and truly started a new life in Mexico, married a hot señorita and started a family, and I had no idea if it was ever going to return.

It took me ages to even want to get back on the horse but I noticed that things started to change when Kobe started preschool. It made total sense. For almost five years I had always been at home with a child — or two, or three — and after five years I finally got two days to myself back. So I used that time to do something for myself. It wasn't 'take a poo solo' (but that also felt good). I started pilates. It was there that I slowly started to feel like myself again. I’m not sure if it was the endorphins the pilates set off, or the fact that I didn’t have someone hanging off me every minute of the day, but all of a sudden I had a slight skip in my step. And slowly but surely I felt my libido packing up its belongings over in Mexico and starting its long journey home. It still took a while — because it’s a libido, and it doesn't know how to read airport signs — but after a few months of lying on my back and exercising (the only form of exercise I like), my libido walked through the front door and back into my life. Not only did I feel so much better but I started being the one initiating sex. Doing something for myself (even just pilates for an hour twice a week) made me feel like I was coming alive again. Hornbag Amy from 2001 probably won't ever resurface but a more mature, sexually charged mum of three had taken her place. My mojo was back.

For those of you who are back where I was seven years ago, I promise you things will change again for the better. But it’s definitely not something that shifts overnight. You will one day start to feel like yourself again, and you'll realise that this too was a season that passed. So ride the roller-coaster (or horsey) that is your libido after children, communicate to your partner if you need time, and say what you want. Listen to your partner's needs and compromise somewhere in the middle. Buy yourself a pear and get reacquainted with your bad self; work out what you and your body like now that things have moved about. Take that new knowledge (and your new toy) into the relationship and spice things up a bit.

Feature Image: @amy.gerard Instagram.

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