Sleep, Sex and Chardonnay

Do kids kill a marriage? If you’re Ayelet Waldman who wrote the radioactive “New York Times” essay professing more love for her husband than for her own kids and then famously appeared on “Oprah” to defend her unique position; the answer is clearly no. But for the rest of us with young children who cling to our ankles like Koala Bears while whining over spilled Sippy Cups and interrupting our precious sleep, I think the honest answer is a solid, maybe.

This is a topic no one discusses before you have children. Weren’t we told that babies brought couples closer – the DNA link, the biological bond, the changing of the poopy diapers? Babies were supposed to make it official, seal the relationship, right? Wrong.

I realized this nearly six years ago on a gorgeous, spring afternoon when my first born was a few weeks old. We looked like the quintessential, idyllic, New York City family. My husband Michael walked our chocolate lab, I pushed the fancy Maclaren (it was the pre-Bugaboo era) and my beautiful baby Jonah, sporting a fabulous onesie lay peacefully inside his stroller – all for about one minute. When Jonah started crying, he didn’t stop. Thirty blocks later, with my boobs literally bursting with milk spontaneously leaking by the primordial, maternal reaction to a newborn cry, I swear I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Weeks of waking up every two hours with a colicky baby had taken its toll on both me and Michael.

“I have to nurse the baby,” I told Michael. “I’m stopping at the next bench.”

“But I’m hungry, I need to eat now!" Michael, who has an infamous short fuse when his blood sugar is low, shouted at me.

“Then get something to eat,” I said whipping out my boob and struggling to get Jonah successfully secured onto my nipple in between his frantic squeals for milk.

“Fine,” Michael said, marching off.

Small children stress a marriage. The utter exhaustion of getting through the day with little ones could drive you to drink heavily. This was apparently documented on the “Today” show recently with a controversial segment about Chardonnay playdates where moms drink and kids play. (By the way, I see nothing wrong with this, and to be fair, they weren’t getting drunk, just taking the edge off.)

And then there’s the sex. My informal surveys among moms have found unequivocally that most of us would happily trade the possibility of an orgasm for a guaranteed extra 30 minutes of delicious sleep. This, of course, is not what we imagined when we were saying our “I do’s.” Pre-kids, my husband and I vowed not to turn into one of those couples who had to schedule sex once a week just to make sure we had it. We were about romance, spontaneity, and adventure. But six years and two kids later, the truth is, all I want to do is to take a nap.