“My Husband & I Refuse To Have Sex At Bedtime”

This story is an “as told to” and anonymous. The mom in this story is a mother of four, in her 30s, living in the Southeast.

I did the math recently and discovered that I have been pregnant and/or breastfeeding a child for eight consecutive years. I’m in my late 30s, so that feels like a pretty intense chunk of time, especially when it’s something that directly affects my body.

Sex obviously has been affected by all of this, too. I can honestly say that my husband and I have maintained a great relationship and marriage throughout these years of growing our family. We rarely ever fight, and I always thank my lucky stars that I seem to have gotten the kind of guy all of my friends and peers think doesn’t exist. He fully takes on half of our household’s responsibilities and puts 100% effort into parenting, so I never feel resentful or angry about how much I’m doing versus how much he is doing.

But sex has still been tough for us to figure out. We’re both really into the idea of it, but by the time we get four kids, 7 and under, into bed, we’re completely exhausted. My youngest just turned 1, so even though he sleeps well, there’s just something about the bedtime routine that turns me and my husband into pumpkins. It’s not like reading bedtime stories and nursing a baby to sleep is exactly sexy, right?

So for the last three months or so, my husband and I made a pact — we would no longer try to have sex at bedtime.

Before, it felt like the only option because the kids would all be asleep and in their own rooms, and we could finally have some free time. But we realized that waiting until the end of the day for sex is like waiting until the end of the day to exercise or finish a work project or do any kind of task — it just didn’t feel fun, and we had zero energy for it. Plus, we didn’t ever want our sex life to get into a bedtime rut where the only time we had to be intimate with each other was in bed, at night, when our kids were asleep. Blah.

That definitely means we have to get creative. I stay at home with our two youngest, and our older two are in school every day until 2:30. My husband doesn’t usually get home until 5:30 or 6, and then it’s just chaos until bedtime.

But at least once a week, I set an alarm for 5:30 and wake him up with a blow job. Sometimes that’s all we can manage before a kid bursts in or the baby starts crying, but it’s enough to get us both super horny for more sex later.

If he doesn’t have any meetings, he’ll come home for lunch — but the lunch is just me. We try to time it during our kids’ naptime, but if they’re awake, I put them in the big playard we have, put on Ms. Rachel, and we quickly bang it out in the downstairs bathroom, where we can still hear them. It’s fast, but it’s incredibly hot to know he’s come home just to f*ck me.

Sunday afternoons have become my new favorite. We put the baby and the toddler down for a nap, we tell our big kids we’re going to fold laundry upstairs, and we give them their tablets. And then we get it on.

We basically bust our asses during the week to make time for sex other than bedtime, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I tell people, I try to make sure they know that you don’t need an hour-long sex session to feel satisfied. Usually we’re just craving the intimacy with each other, and we also make sure to kiss a lot during the week and have little mini makeouts before he leaves for work.

But when it comes to sex, we don’t need a whole lot of time. And being super creative with our ideas and prioritizing sex is way hotter than an extra 20 minutes could ever be.