Why It’s Okay To Feel Uncomfortable With Intimacy When Your Kid Sleeps In Your Bed
It’s 10:37 p.m. The sheets still smell like lavender fabric softener, but there’s a sticky cherry popsicle stain on the corner by my pillow that I missed when I changed them this morning. Our three-year-old, Lila, is passed out with her head on my forearm, her little knuckles curled around the elastic of my sweatpants. She’s been teething for a week, and cried for 20 minutes when I tried to put her in her crib an hour earlier, so I gave up. My husband, Ryan, shut the light, kicked off his jeans, and slid in behind me. Ten seconds later, his hand drifted up my thigh.
I flinched and pushed it away, my breath coming out in a sharp whisper. “She’s right here,” I said. Ryan mumbled back that she was dead asleep, she wouldn’t wake up, she wouldn’t know anything was happening. It’s been two weeks since we’ve had sex, between Lila’s cold, my big work deadline, and the broken water heater we had to fix at 8 a.m. last Saturday. We’re both tired, we both miss this. He didn’t see what the big deal was.
I laid there after that, stiff as a board, the fan whirring above us, Lila’s soft breath on my arm. I couldn’t relax. That icky, crawly feeling wouldn’t go away, even after Ryan rolled over and fell asleep five minutes later. I kept thinking, am I wrong? Is this just me being weird, overreacting, letting mom brain take over every part of my life?
I got up an hour later, grabbed an extra blanket from the hall closet, and crashed on the couch. I drank a glass of cold oat milk out of a chipped mug, and scrolled through the closed mom group I’m part of on Facebook, typing that question into the search bar: “Husband wanted to have sex when kid was asleep in bed, I feel gross, am I wrong?” The responses were split right down the middle. Half said I was being unreasonable, that a toddler doesn’t know what’s going on, that parents have to take what they can get when they can get it. The other half said it was totally weird, that I was right to set a boundary. No one really talked about why the icky feeling is there, though—they just picked sides.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past couple of weeks, since that night. A lot of the conversation around this topic revolves around whether it hurts the kid, whether they’ll remember it or be traumatized. And sure, that’s a thing, but for me, that wasn’t even the main point. The main point was my comfort. After three years of having someone attached to you almost 12 hours a day—nursing, needing to be picked up, touching your face when you’re trying to work, climbing into your lap when you’re peeing—your body stops feeling just yours. When my kid is in my bed, even asleep, my brain is still in mom mode. I’m still on alert, listening for her to cough or stir or cry out. I can’t just flip a switch and turn that off to be intimate with my partner. That’s not overreacting. That’s just how parent brain works.
And even for Lila, it’s not about whether she’s awake or not. Kids pick up on adult energy even when they’re half asleep. I can’t count how many times Lila has woken up crying mid-nap when Ryan and I were arguing in the next room about the grocery bill, or when I was stressed and pacing the hall after a bad work call. She doesn’t know what we’re saying, but she picks up on the tension. If she did wake up in the middle of us being intimate, she wouldn’t understand what she was seeing. We spend all this time teaching her that private parts are private, that grown ups do some things alone or only with each other behind closed doors. Blurring that line when we’re tired or busy doesn’t do her any favors, even if she doesn’t remember it later.
The next morning, after I dropped Lila off at playgroup, I sat down with Ryan at the kitchen table while he ate his cereal, and I said it plain. I didn’t call him a jerk or make him feel bad for wanting intimacy. I just said, “When Lila is in our bed, even asleep, I can’t be present with you. That icky feeling I have isn’t about you—it’s about my boundary, and it’s non-negotiable. When I say no in that situation, that’s the end of it, no justifying, no pushing.” Then we worked out three small changes that haven’t upended our life, but have fixed that problem entirely.
First, if Lila falls asleep in our bed before we turn in for the night, one of us will carry her to her crib within 20 minutes, even if she fusses a little. We keep the monitor on full volume right by our bed, so if she wakes up, we’ll hear her immediately. Second, if she climbs into bed with us in the middle of the night after a nightmare, we both just accept that intimacy isn’t happening that night, no hard feelings, no pressure. Third, we blocked out an hour every other Saturday afternoon, when my mom takes Lila to the park for ice cream, that’s just for us. It’s not a rigid schedule, it’s just a guaranteed time when the house is quiet and the bed is only ours.
We still have awkward moments sometimes. Last weekend, Lila napped for two hours longer than usual, and our planned time got canceled. We still don’t have as much intimacy as we did before we had kids, and that’s okay. The difference is, I don’t get that icky crawly feeling anymore when we go to bed now. I don’t lie awake wondering if I was wrong for how I felt that night. Boundaries don’t have to be big or dramatic to matter. Sometimes they’re just saying, “This doesn’t work for me, let’s find something that does.” It’s still not perfect, and we’re still adjusting to this whole co-parenting thing, but for now, this works for us.
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