Mommy Madness: The Romance Problem

I am a big fan of Bethenny Frankel, creator of the Skinnygirl margarita, star of the show Bethenny Ever After. Recently she commented on the challenge of juggling her work, her child, and her marriage and made a reference to how her husband’s “penis has cobwebs on it.”

When I heard that, I spewed my drink ALLLLLLLL over the place. I mean, it’s both sad and funny that I totally understood what she meant. It’s just really difficult to be romantic when you have small children. Sometimes it just seems easier to not even try, but that is just plain depressing if you allow yourself to think about it. I mean really. My husband and I used to s-m-o-l-d-e-r. I pine for those days. I continue to hold onto the hope that we can smolder again, despite the two tiny people who reside with us.

How do marriages survive children? And not only survive, but remain HAPPY?

I have read countless articles, blogs, books and tidbits on this subject for the past few years and I still don’t know the answer. Date nights, blah blah blah, make time for each other, blah blah blah. It all sounds fabulous until you shut the book or magazine that you’re reading these ideas out of and pick up your phone to text your husband “WE NEED A DATE NIGHT  – ASAP” … or, “WE NEED TO HAVE SEX BEFORE YOUR PENIS GROWS COBWEBS ON IT.”

But before you can type out the words, you hear screaming from the other room. Someone bit someone else’s finger. And then someone has a poop diaper and the other one needs help in the bathroom and OMG, I forgot tomorrow is my mother’s birthday, I need to order flowers and OMG, I need to make dinner. And so on and so forth. The text never gets sent. Date night never happens.

The cobwebs arrive.

Since I am in the throes of adjusting to life as a stay-at-home-mom as well as suffering from a case of postpartum depression, it’s hard for me to see the other side. I know that we’ll make it, but how long will it take and how many cobwebs are going to to be present once we finally emerge from this dark season? Is this what happens to so many marriages who claim that they “fell out of love” with each other?

Lucky for me and my cobwebbed partner, I know that love isn’t just about sex. I mean, a lot of it is, at least in our house, but not ALL. Thank goodness we have other facets to our relationship that we can fall on when life continuously gets in the way of romance.

Well … really we only have one thing we can fall back on: humor. Because when your three-year-old walks in on you doing the dirty, and then proceeds to ask you over and over again why you were wrestling, the only way to cope with it is to laugh. And then never have sex again.

About Harmony:

Harmony blew into Birmingham after Hurricane Katrina and recently quit her job to stay at home with her two boys. Her sanity is in question. Visit her blog at Modern Mommy Madness.