Motherhood Has Made Me Hotter
My body may be different now, but she sure knows how to have a good time.
Note: I originally wrote this essay to submit to another Substack for publication, but they passed on it. Maybe it was the swearing… Their loss, regardless! Please keep in mind that the Monday post is always for paid subscribers, so if you want to upgrade to access the full essay, you can do so using the button below. Thank you for reading. Enjoy ;)
The best-kept secret of motherhood is that sex gets exponentially better after you give birth. Well, maybe not for everyone. I haven’t sent out surveys or anything. But definitely for me. And if I had known, when I was on my hands and knees on the floor of my master bathroom screaming bloody murder as I pushed an 8.5-pound baby through the birth canal, out of my vagina and into the world, that my sex life was about to transform for the better, I might have expressed significantly more enthusiasm for the task at hand. Hindsight, am I right?
The discovery that my sex life had blossomed alongside motherhood coincided with a family trip to the Outer Banks four months after my daughter was born. My husband’s extended kin decided to rent a beachside mansion for a week, so we packed up our baby and our things, and flew to the coastal oasis that would give me a break from 16 straight weeks of nonstop mom-ing. I was, in a word, pumped.
This would be the first time my husband and I had a real opportunity to get down. We’d only done the deed maybe once before the trip, and it mostly felt like an exploratory mission. What was going on down there these days? I felt self-conscious, even though my husband assured me that it felt the same—a pleasant lie that would become glaringly apparent when I jogged to a yoga class only to realize with horror that I’d unknowingly pissed myself somewhere along the way.
Another reason I didn’t know about my newfound sexual superpowers was that I wasn’t one of those ladies who celebrated postpartum with an immediate return to enthusiastic bang sessions. It might have been the tearing or the triple hemorrhage or the unprecedented exhaustion or the fact that my body felt like it was just barely holding itself together, but I just wasn’t ready to romp with the person who was partly responsible for my current state. If I’m honest, I was a little scared about what might happen. Would I, like Angela Garbes, the esteemed author of Like a Mother, also squirt milk from my tits like a rogue fire hydrant when I orgasmed for the first time? TBD! Although, spoiler alert, I would not.
Turns out, I had nothing to fear. Getting over the hump, so to speak, was as simple as drinking a healthy amount of mezcal and not giving a shit. The sex was so good it made me question whether it was some sort of unexpected vacation effect. It’s always thrilling to fuck in someone else’s bed, especially if you can open the French doors and fuck to the soothing backdrop of a real-world sound machine, but you’d think that phenomenon would be somewhat hampered by your husband’s twin brother and his family sleeping in the bedroom across the hall or the four-month-old certified vibe killer snoozing in the Pack-n-Play two feet away. The orgasms, however, spoke for themselves. I’ve never had so much fun on a family vacation.
Call me a pessimist, but I didn’t expect the soul-shattering climaxes to last. After we returned to our home in Austin, I anticipated diminishing returns. There weren’t any baby-crazed relatives to soften the blow of childrearing. The parenting became the sole responsibility of the parents again, and we weren’t about to get toasted on school nights. But the mundanity of everyday living did little to mar my sexual ecstasy. My body didn’t need the aphrodisiac of the ocean, the culmination of hot days melting into even hotter nights. She could bring the good times all on her own.
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