Monday, April 22, 2013

Let's Talk About Sex...BABY!

Resolve.org
It's National Infertility Awareness Week...and since this blog is partly about infertility...I'm ahead of the game!! In honor of this special week I'm gonna talk about sex..YAY...BLEH! I'm partly writing about this to keep myself accountable and for any other poor soul that may stumble on this blog one day and find it helpful.

Babble.com
Begin at the Beginning

El Hubster and I didn't meet in a traditional way. In fact, we are both members of two nationalities that rarely, if ever, interact. He was raised in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood in Inwood, I in a predominantly Jamaican neighborhood in Brooklyn. Never the twain shall meet! So, MySpace to the rescue.

So a crazy, Dominican, ex-cigarette and pot smoking, Grateful deadhead (still!!), bodybuilder met a Jamaican, sheltered, broken, neurotic, intellectual and it was MAGIC. El Hubster likes to remind me that when we met I didn't know what a Dominican was...and he was right. It only took us three dates to fall into bed...gasp! and he wasn't the aggressor...it was me...double gasp! Our sex life was rocking for that first year. We were in that first flush of love and lust and after maybe two months we were already talking about marriage. We moved in together at the end of our first year together and embarked on a roller coaster ride of life---a horrible first apartment experience followed by serious depression after I lost my job followed by both of us going to grad school AT THE SAME TIME. Our previously hot sex life was virtually non-existent at this point.

When we decided to finally get married we recommitted ourselves to celibacy and didn't have sex for a year before our marriage in 2010. Needless to say, the honeymoon was off the chain!

With all of the things we'd been through, we went from twice a day sex to twice a week sex. We found our own groove and twice a week seemed to work well for us. I admit I often wondered if we were having sex too little compared to our friends but after much thought (and a few arguments) about it, we decided that we were doing it just enough for us.

Infertility Monster

After our first miscarriage, during my internship from hell, my sex drive plummeted. We threw ourselves into TTC and had sex every other day for three months. After the second miscarriage, it went to sex twice a month. Yep....twice A MONTH! I felt horrible because I just wasn't into it and angry because he didn't seem to mind. He has never once said to me, "We're not having enough sex." So we would argue about that. I was so traumatized by the loss that I couldn't ever imagine sex being enjoyable in any way.

I was soon diagnosed with PCOS and fibroids, went ahead to have surgery to remove the fibroids and had a  6 week recovery with no sex. Surprisingly my sex drive returned full force after the surgery. I now believe that my crazy hormone imbalance was the culprit for my low libido all along. So now I'm rearing to go and he's.....not. We're still having sex twice a month...SIGH.

Now that we're back in TTC mode again, we're finding it hard to get back in the saddle. Are we having sex because we want to or because we have to? More often than not, it's the latter. By the time he gets home from long days at the office or giving an evening workshop, he's dog tired and wants to eat, watch TV and sleep in that order. I spend my day cleaning, exercising, preparing dinner and trying to keep depression at bay. By the time we get around to looking at each other our lustful eyes are drooping from sheer exhaustion and it's midnight.

Epiphany
 
I spent a lot of time blaming El Hubster for our lack of sex or enjoyment of sex but I've never taken into account that he might be traumatized. Here is a man that has also gone through two miscarriages, dealt with my crazy mood swings, shook in his boots while his wife was being operated on, nursed me at home during my recovery and now has to have sex or manually stimulate himself on command! Needless to say, I have a new found  appreciation for what he's going through.

Infertility is hard...for both of us. We both have to make an extra effort to make sex fun and enjoyable again. We spent most of last night talking about how we can reclaim our sex life from the infertility monster. Here are some things we came up with:

  • Turn off the television. This is the single biggest sex distractor in our home. We both enjoy television and have shows that we watch together. The television is major stress relief for us but it's killing our sex life. It's going off at 10pm from now on.
  • Turn off the electronic devices. This includes his grateful dead message boards and my Facebook support groups and Pinterest lurking. El Hubster and I are super techies and we love to know what's going on immediately...all the time. You can find us sitting on the couch refreshing our twitter feeds most nights. This is not cute. We've decided to surrender them at 10pm as well. I'm hoping to surrender twitter at 6pm eventually.
  • Keep up with date night. Date night has always been important for us but we've let it slack of late. Now that we have a car...we have no excuse for this. We are taking back Friday nights for ourselves..even if it means going to a worship service or to Home Depot (which is a lot of fun for us....errr...me).
  • Keep it spicy. I hate being bored...especially with sex. I'm hoping we can commit ourselves to being more adventurous and trying new things. I am going to make a sincere effort not to come to bed in pajamas...with my socks still on...and ashy legs. I'm realizing more and more that romance is a foreign concept for most men and El Hubster is no exception. They don't quite understand that women need to be warmed up physically, mentally and emotionally before sex. And no matter how many times I try to drive this point home, it doesn't stick. I need to find a book for him to read so he can get it!
I can't imagine finally having the family we've always wanted and losing each other in the process. I won't stand for that.

Now, I'm off to Home Depot because suddenly I'm getting the itch to go.

2 comments:

  1. This was awesome!

    The hardest thing for me during the process was the sex part. For some reason "I'm fertile lets get it on" didn't seem to appeal to him. And I'd resent him if he didn't want to produce on demand, or if he got upset about the production. It says a lot that you're cognizant of the issue and considering his feelings. I totally didn't.

    Jethro and I met when I was 19 and he was 29. Let's just say the frequency is way different 14 years. Way!!!!! LOL.

    You've inspired me. I'm going to try to lose my socks too. (Even though they keep my feet toasty warm)

    This is the longest comment ever.

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  2. Haha! Bek,I'm so glad you enjoyed it! It took a lot for me to put it all out there but sometimes you just need to get things out. When we first started TTC it helped to not even tell him when I was ovulating because he would have total anxiety about it and not be able to perform.

    Nowadays, he's a pro and he's ready to go but most of the foreplay and tender touches have gone out of it because he sees sex as a task to be accomplished. We're working to bring all the good stuff back. I think it's difficult for women to put themselves in men's shoes during this process.

    It was VERY difficult for me to come to terms with our different libidos. I had this idea in my head that men ALWAYS want sex and it just wasn't the case for us and I had to learn to work around that. I'm sure it's even more difficult when there's an age difference! I still have the higher sex drive, although the Clomid has dampened it of late. I'm hopeful it will come back.

    And yes, I'm heartbroken about having to lose my socks...

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