LIFE & CULTURE

My Secret Sex Diary: “I’m Busting Out Of My Post-Kids Sexual Wasteland”

In marie claire’s juicy new series, we ask women to share 48 hours of their sex lives.

Saturday

1AM. I can’t believe he did it again tonight. We’d had an exhausting, gruelling day. I slept badly last night and almost cried when I woke up this morning at the thought of it. The first half was spent packing for our week up the coast for Christmas, the three kids alternating between watching TV and wreaking havoc through the house, wanting to go. Then loading the van, and driving for eight hours with the kids in the back, laughing, whinging, fighting. Fast food and dirty toilet stops in the heat.

It was dark when we finally got to the house, a beautiful, 100-year-old timber homestead – worth the drive. After getting the kids to bed we had a couple of gins with my sister, in bed ourselves at midnight. Instead of the quiet snore that I usually hear from him within a few minutes, while I lie awake thinking and worrying, he’s running his fingers up my leg, then he’s down under the sheets going for it. AGAIN! It’s a goddam Christmas miracle.

Two deep orgasms later, so intense I almost wake the sleeping toddler meters from our bed, we have sex and I’m so ready I can feel every inch of him. It’s intense and it goes for the right amount of time – not too long. It’s humid and he’s fallen asleep naked under the ceiling fan.

This obsession with my vagina started two weeks ago, and he’s been down there almost daily for the last two weeks. He was halfway through a stressful work project, doing 12 hour days, averaging 5 hours sleep a night. Stress usually has the opposite effect on his libido, but not this time. And his happy/horny place seems to be tongue deep between my legs, giving me orgasm after mind blowing orgasm. He’s insatiable.

Instead of the quiet snore that I usually hear from him within a few minutes, while I lie awake thinking and worrying, he’s running his fingers up my leg, then he’s down under the sheets going for it.

This is an excellent development, but also very, very strange.  Sure, we had hot sex all the time when we first met, cunnilingus and fellatio galore. But the past 7 years of child rearing have been a sexual wasteland for us. This past year especially, with both of us back at work and a third child in the mix, days would go by where we’d barely talk, avoiding even an accidental touch in the kitchen while making breakfast, so deep was the exhaustion and the irritation from the work kids slog. We were surviving, gritting our teeth, with no break in sight. Weekends were worse, with three kids to entertain, meals to cook, social events left early when the baby needed a nap, or the four-year-old boy started hitting someone.

I’d started to face the possibility that our sex life may never come back. And then without it what are we to each other, how will our relationship survive? But now he’s started craving me, and worshipping my body, and I’m alive with touch and sensation and I think  – it’s over, the time in the trenches. We’re back, me and my man. Anything is possible now. I could even be happy again.

Sunday

10AM. I’m in the kitchen in the holiday house making sandwiches after a swim, my sister and her husband and my parents are buzzing around, chatting, eating cheese, pouring wine. Everyones in holiday mode. My phone beeps. It’s my husband, he’s outside with the kids.

‘Text me a photo of it’. 

I roll my eyes, but feel a flicker of excitement.

‘Stop it!!’ I text back, like a teenager.

‘I’m serious’ he responds.

I leave it, but I get another message.

‘I’m waiting’.

I’ve had enough wine with lunch to think ok, I’m going to go take a picture of my vagina and send it to my husband. I go upstairs, get out of my swimmers and take a shower and then get down on the bathroom mat and angle my phone at my crotch. It feels really unsexy. I primp and fluff it up a bit, try to get my labia to look its best. Smile! I can hear our one-year-old crying, it’s her nap time. I find the best pic and send it off, triple checking its to him. Then I try to figure out how to delete it and I can’t, so there’s a picture of my vagina sitting there when I open texts to my husband. My 7-year-old knows the code to my phone. I make a mental note to keep my phone on me at all times until I figure out how to delete it. 

I put the baby down and see my husband downstairs. He’s not saying anything. I’m a little anxious about how it’s been received. ‘Did you get it?’ I ask. ‘I sure did’ he smiles. ‘I’ve been looking at it’.

I find the best pic and send it off, triple checking its to him. Then I try to figure out how to delete it and I can’t, so there’s a picture of my vagina sitting there when I open texts to my husband.

1PM. We put a movie on for the big kids and their cousins while the baby naps. I feel like a nap too but my husband has other plans, and I’m easily persuaded when I have a pretty good idea whats going to happen. He leads me upstairs to the kids’ room, pushes one of their single beds against the door, and proceeds to voraciously eat me out in a variety of different poses. I really hate that term but there is no better explanation for it on this occasion. It’s a turn on being devoured like this but it feels better when he slows down.

The sex is ok – I’m half listening for a kid on the stairs the whole time. After I ask him, jokingly, if he’s been cheating and feels bad, and now he’s trying to make it up to me. He says he’s been cheating on me with work.

Monday

6.30AM, Christmas morning. Really horrible night with the baby. She has tonsillitis and was up for hours. She holds my nipple and plays with it when she’s wanting comfort or safety, and she lay in bed with us doing that for hours last night, dozing and waking, unable to settle, until it started to hurt and I told her too harshly to stop it, and she cried. She woke at 6.30am cranky and sick, and I got up with her and the big kids and let my husband sleep. But she was a hot mess, so I took her back upstairs, changed her, gave her panadol and milk, and put her in to bed screaming and shut the door. Within ten minutes she was asleep. My husband got up to watch the kids, and I crashed out in the kids bedroom. 

8.30AM, Christmas morning. The baby is awake and much happier, and I take her downstairs so the big kids can finally open presents.  My husband and I sit and watch them handing out presents and opening them. They’re so excited. He puts his arm around me and we cuddle in to each other. We haven’t got each other anything, as usual. Money is too tight, and we’re too pragmatic. Sometimes I wish he’d got me something anyway, as a surprise. This time I really don’t care. I lean in to him, and place my hand on his warm, muscly thigh, and feel a ripple of desire.

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