How Hard Should Parents Try To Hide Their Sex Lives From Their Kids?
Getting laid was so much easier as a single mom.
Not many things could be said to be “easier” about single parenting as opposed to coupled parenting, but in my experience, having done both, sex was easier as a single mom. To define “easier” for this purpose: I mean easy as in, simple, uncomplicated. And I don’t necessarily mean that in terms of what it meant for my relationships to the people I had sex with; that varied wildly and they were often as messy as any other time in my life. But the act of having sex: that had real structure and clarity, baby.
When I was a single mom, sex was certainly not easy in the sense of it being effortless; it required so much effort. When you have a kid, and you have to coordinate someone else to keep it alive every time you want to go out, you have to plan to get laid, which unto itself, takes some of the fun of some kinds of sex off the table. But that was a small price to pay in exchange for the built-in boundaries that having a kid created for my sex life. These boundaries, when upheld, which I was fairly religious about doing, created a clear, never-to-be-crossed line between my parenting life and my sex life. And this ultimately benefited both parts of my life.
Here were the rules:
No sex at home.
This one was pretty simple. If my kid was safely in the care of another trusted adult, I would permit myself the indulgent risk of going to someone else’s apartment to maybe get murdered, maybe have an orgasm (the age-old dice all single people must roll), but if I met someone I wanted to get naked with, we were definitely taking it off campus. Basic respect for the sanctity and safety of my kid’s living space, etc. Also I really never wanted him to ever walk in and see some random man’s bits, or even have to run into him in the hallway on the way to get water. I prefer to traumatize him in more surprising ways later, nothing that basic.
No getting lost in a dude’s bed for days at a time at the expense of my job and other responsibilities.
Before I was a mom, the experience of fucking someone new, if I really like them, would often result in me letting the rest of my life fall into disrepair for a few weeks, like sex with them was going to save me from death or whatever. I got Dick Sick in a bad way.
And whatever, no judgment to past me, because who doesn’t love the feeling of getting pulled underwater by your desire for someone? It usually ended with my friends literally showing up at my front door to drag me back into the world, or else getting shaken to reality when the guy said something boner-killing like “yeah but like, even confederate statues are history when you think about it.” This all stopped once I had a kid. It didn’t stop me from becoming single-mindedly obsessed with letting a particular person destroy me, once my body aligned to that setting, but feeding that obsession became an indulgence that had to be parceled out at more sane intervals since, Dick Sickness notwithstanding, I had no interest in dipping out of motherhood for days at a time. Again, this only improved the quality of my sex life overall, for a few reasons:
Delayed gratification is incredibly fun (and not something I’d ever suffered myself to learn before this)
It allowed me to stay horny for someone way longer before they said the dumb thing that would eventually make it impossible to tolerate their company.
There were plenty of ways in which becoming a parent exponentially improved my approach to relationships overall, but that’s another topic. There were ways in which growing and expelling a human from my body, over a few years, painfully unhooked me from so many hangups about my body, and on the other side of that was sex that was more pleasurable than anything I could’ve imagined before. But that’s another topic too. This is about the parameters between the part of me who creates mini crossword puzzles for my toddler, and the part of me who nearly got railed up against a wall in Hell’s Kitchen a few nights later because getting to a bed seemed like too long a wait. I had strong boundaries and really felt like I was thriving within them.
And then, one day, I got married, and all of that changed.
There’s a whole other post coming at some point where I will, at long last, write a definitive list of pros and cons for sex with someone you’re married to vs someone whose last name you don’t know, but for the moment, I’ll summarize briefly, as someone who is both deeply Sagittarius and raised by parents whose only known solution to any problem was to simply cut and run. I love to quit things; jobs, relationships, whatever. Better than drugs to me. So a big challenge, as I’ve gotten older and found myself accumulating challenging things that I love very much and don’t want to unburden myself of (like, for starters, my child and later my husband), has been learning to push through the times when my hardwiring tells me to bail. Which is to say, the person I’m married to is, by far, the person I’ve fucked the longest, and my summary of that experience so far is that it is great. A+, highly recommend sex with someone who has made you cum thousands of times because they will generally be very good at it.
But here’s the problem: now my sex life and my parenting life exist in the same house. And even this wasn’t altogether that challenging for a while. My kid was 5 when I started dating my now-husband, he was 6 a year later when they first met, and he was 7 when he moved in with us—so while the two of them were taking a nice, easy, long time to get to know each other before we all undertook the collective commitment of binding our lives together, I got a nice, long time to adjust to the idea that my orgasms would be made in-house now, sometimes with just a wall between my beautiful, precious child, and the extremely un-christian things I wanted my husband to do to me. I fucking hated this.
But for a while, it was fine. The pandemic took away my favorite horny respite in the day, school hours, but that didn’t matter since I was too overwhelmed by the state of the world and myself in it to want to have sex that much. Eventually that paralysis gave way to the opposite: an urgency to get dicked down like the world was on fire, because it was. And unlike all the dudes who got me superficially strung out on them earlier in my life, it really seemed like having incredible sex with my husband, whom i loved so completely, actually might be the only thing that would save me from death. So okay, we were all stuck in this one apartment, with one bathroom, and we couldn’t go anywhere, and that sucked, but the collapse of all the boundaries that had previously existed in our lives somehow made it feel more acceptable that my own church-and-state lines about sex and parenting were also dissolving. And that’s how I learned to just, like, be quiet during sex. Not ideal but doable.
And we were good again for a few years. I was having sex, in my house, where my child lived, and I somehow felt like everything was still intact that I wanted to be intact. I mean, couples have been fucking with kids down the hall since the beginning of time, but whatever, it was new to me. The line between your sex life and your kids, it turns out, can absolutely still comfortably exist without sex needing to happen at a second location. You just get creative. You sext your husband at the dinner table. It’s all fine.
And then we went and decided to try to have a baby, and I’m worried that line might be destroyed for good.
In a perfect world, if you have an older kid and you decide to add a new baby to the situation, you are granted to luxury of kicking off the whole project in private. You can have some intentionally timed sex, conceive a baby, and tell your kid whenever you decide to do so. There’s a very big difference between telling a kid we’re having a baby and telling them we’re trying to have a baby, and that difference ultimately comes down to whether they’re going to think about the baby or the trying. Obviously, the former feels ideal to me! Look, my son had just turned 9 when we decided to start raw dogging for procreation’s sake, so he already knew the deal with sex and babies and all that. Fine. When we turned up pregnant the first month we tried, and we told him, of course it was possible that he could put two and two together, etc. I wasn’t that worried about it. It’s not like I’m pathologically averse to him knowing we have sex (deal with it, buddy!) and I was excited for him to know he wasn’t going to have to endure the hardship of caring for us in our old age by himself—huge, amazing news!
But then, as quickly as i was pregnant, I wasn’t anymore. And that irrevocably changed the conversation, for all 3 of us.
The question became: would we try again? It was hard to say. Because in one sense, I had just lost a pregnancy I’d very much wanted, and with it, lost the potential of a baby who would now not be born. So yes, god of course yes, we would try again! But on the other hand, I had just lost a pregnancy I’d very much wanted, and with it, lost the potential of a baby who would now not be born. So omg no, absolutely fucking not, I did not want to do that again.
Of course, I would never consider putting it on my kid to bear that kind of decision or even bear witness to the depth of my emotions on both sides of the issue. I very much had to be controlled as hell about what I said to him and how I presented the situation to him, since it would entirely dictate how he emotionally processed everything. Again, this is an entire rabbit hole unto itself, but it netted out something like: “When you first get pregnant, you don’t immediately have a baby in there—first your body has to build the body for the baby to live in. It can’t move in until it’s built! it’s like your body is building a brand new body from scratch, and there are a million little parts that have to be just right, and about half the time, something goes wrong early in the building process, so your body is like “Oops! Let’s yeet this one and try another one later!” and so no baby can ever start living in that body, and all the parts just kinda get flushed out. The baby doesnt get flushed because the baby hadn’t even moved in yet! So this happens and it’s totally fine, and it’s totally fine to be disappointed. Like if you were building a house to move into and it got burned down before you moved in, you would be disappointed!” Being that he was an 8-year-old kid, getting into the details about pregnancy and how exceedingly normal it is for early pregnancies to not work out, that this wasn’t a tragedy, but actually just how it works and it’s fine—it not only seemed to give him a perspective on the situation that would mitigate his feelings of loss, but it was also all very technically accurate and informative. He was learning a lot, so hey, net positive? something like that.
But even though I would never make a kid feel like they should decide something as huge as whether or not we try again to have a baby, I did have to acknowledge that he was officially part of the conversation now. He knew we had tried once, which meant the question of whether we would try again didn’t only hang between me and my husband—my kid was there now too.
In the 18 months since this time, we have tried again, and we’ve had another loss (this one far more dramatic and brutal) and I’m sure I’ll write more about that soon. And there’s an entire other post that I know I’ll write about how trying to conceive a child changes (and doesn’t) how you think and feel about sex (and even how you have sex sometimes), but that’s not really what I’m thinking about today. Here’s what today is about: Ever since my 10-year-old turned to me the other day and asked, “Are you ovulating soon?” a question has been haunting me:
By being open with my kid that we’ve been trying to have a baby for the last few years, am I also forcing him to consider all the sex we’re having in pursuit of making that baby?
Let me jump ahead of you: Sure, I’m probably overthinking this, and rest assured, I am not losing sleep over it. But it does beg a broader question, one that I actually don’t have an answer for:
How obligated should parents feel to hide evidence of their sex life from their kids?
An example: a few weeks ago, my husband and I were having sex at, like, 11am on a weekday. Kid was at school. Slack messages be damned. At one point, I went to scream into a pillow or something, and my husband tossed it away and said “he’s not home!” And it was like, oh right, great, amazing. I didn’t have to worry about being quiet. I don’t mind being quiet about sex when my kid is ostensibly sleeping down the hall, just like I wouldn’t get loud out of consideration for roommates when i was younger. It’s just courtesy, and I’m as happy to extend that to roommates I gave birth to as I would anyone else.
But when fertility calendars are regularly mentioned over dinner, I’ve occasionally paused, like, “Ok, if I just mentioned that I think I’m going to ovulate soon, and he know what ovulation is, and he knows how pregnancy occurs, then honestly how close am I just simply announcing to my husband, right in front of our kid, that we need to fuck in the next 48 hours?” It seems kinda close to doing that! Especially as time moves forward, as it mercilessly tends to do, and our kid is 10.5 years old now, and a very clever and perceptive and brilliant 10.5 at that. He’s gotta know what’s up, right? And if he does, to what degree should I be working to keep my sex life far from view?
It’s a tricky question when you get down to it. Is it enough to be quiet if we’re doing it when he’s in the house? The closer my kid gets to the age where his own sexuality becomes a force in his life, and sex generally becomes more prominent on his radar, the more I feel like the pressure to get this balance right becomes super consequential, and just like I didn’t want him to run into mommy’s hookup in the hallway when he was 3, I don’t want to fuck this up either. Because this isn’t just an issue of boundaries or privacy, both of which I feel very competent at orchestrating for all of us—it’s about what we’re modeling for him and the fact that he watches fucking everything now. Being a single mom, once again, was so much easier because now, everything about how I interact with my husband in front of him is demonstrating something to him about relationships, about communication, about how love is given and received, about how to work with someone and how to argue with someone. My kid’s eyes on us, and what we’re teaching him by what we do in front of him, is one of the most important factors in my reality these days. And mostly, I think we nail it. I’m proud of how he sees us handle conflict, and how he sees us help each other, and how sweet we are to each other, and how we talk about mistakes as a family. There’s a huge amount of openness and transparency between the 3 of us, and I have zero doubt that my kid is massively benefitting from it.
But what about horniness?
In theory, totally in a vacuum of it having anything to do with my actual child and my actual self, I feel like it’s healthy and good for kids to see healthy demonstrations of adult sexuality existing in the greater context of an adult relationship and adult life. It’s part of all of it! Seeing it and seeing it come to life, I would think, makes sex feel less scary and foreign and taboo or whatever. To normalize it, etc. I think that’s all good. To draw the line at saying, “Ok mommy and I are going to swap fluids now, go watch Stranger Things,” but to like allow yourself to be a little flirty or whatever in front of kids—I think that’s fine. But it does seem like a much harder line to walk.
My mom, who was mostly single for my childhood, stumbled back and forth across that line. On paper, her boundaries were mostly similar to mine, I’m guessing. She never brought random dudes home, but since she didn’t have the money or community for babysitters, if she was out with someone, we were home alone. And while she didn’t bring hookups home, she did subject us to some experiences with her boyfriends that I would rather not have lived through. Like the time I woke up to get ready for kindergarten, walked into our bathroom, and found her boyfriend passed out on the toilet, drunk from the night before, sound asleep with his pants around his ankles and his ass in the air. This is also the guy who introduced me to Rocky & Bullwinkle and once almost burned our house down by trying to burn a christmas tree in the fireplace in the middle of the day while my mom was at work—I adored him, but I didn’t need to see any man’s ass that early in the morning. Or the time when I was 11 and got my period for the first time while we were spending the day at the apartment of this pilot my mom was dating. They spent the entire day in his bedroom with the door locked while my sisters and I were forced to hang out with his lame sons, and I tried to figure out how to deal with, ya know, my vagina bleeding.
My years as a single mom gave me a ton of compassion for the incredibly difficult task my mom had in front of her—trying to parent and date with limited resources, especially when, in my mom’s case, dating men very much was an essential effort to obtain more resources. I had always been determined to make sure I never needed to date for that reason, not out of shame, but mostly because she didn’t make it look like very much fun. And I had gotten my kid successfully through my single years without him seeing any drunk guy’s ass in his home. But the memory of being on the other side of that locked door, and being 11, and knowing exactly what was going on behind that door, being painfully unable to not know, at the same moment that my body was announcing itself to be throwing me into womanhood (or whatever)—it stuck with me. Boundaries between your sex life and your parenting life were good—locked doors between your sex life and your kids, alone without you on the other side, were not. I still haven’t quite figured out what that perfect middle ground looks like; I don’t know what the ideal way to proudly demonstrate sexuality as an absolutely joyful part of life while respecting your kids’ need to barf at the idea of you naked. There’s a good answer in there somewhere.
Clearly, this isn’t a question I’ve fully resolved. I do think it’s great to normalize sex as a healthy and wonderful part of being an adult and in a relationship…but I also want to keep that part of my life in a nice, private little bubble and not sterilize it by turning it into another socialization lesson for my kid…but I also know that by keeping him even marginally in the loop on our family planning logistics, he’s likely to contemplate the notion of us having sex, and I’m worried fully refusing to ever address that topic gives the implicit idea that there’s something shameful or embarrassing about it, and god, anything by that. But also, being too open about sex at home feels a bit much like forcing your kid to hold your sex life in his mind, and that feels obviously bad. There don’t seem to be any clear right answers. You really wouldn’t have thought it would be easier to have a water-tight parenting strategy about handling your sex life as a single mom than it would be in a marriage, but here we are, all living and breathing and some of us fucking, all under the same roof, with boundaries between the different sides of ourselves that get shaken and challenged the older we get and the more we go through. I mostly love it, but sometimes it makes me want to scream into a pillow.