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I was at a Girl's Night Out dinner last night. Among our group were several seasoned moms, the first-time mother of a newborn and two women without kids whom the rest of us bored to tears with our baby talk.

I filled the new mom in on two universal truths I wish someone had told me: (1) the last thing she's going to want to do for a very, very long time is to have sex, and she shouldn't feel at all guilty about that, and (2) it's normal to hate your husband after you have a baby.

Everyone else was shocked that I said this out loud.

"I didn't hate my husband," the other moms murmured.

Um, yeah. Right.

Every new mother hates her husband. In fact, you're supposed to hate him. Sure, maybe not all of the time. Maybe you even get the warm fuzzies when you see father and child snuggled up on the couch, looking all googly-eyed at one another. And you sigh, and think mushy thoughts about how sweet life is, and the circle of life, and how precious baby feet are, etc., etc.

But then your husband goes off to work, leaving you with a crying, shitting, boob sucking newborn, and you promptly start hating him again.

These feelings are completely normal. In fact, it's nature's way of ensuring that you don't get pregnant again while you have a newborn. After all, if you hate your husband, you won't have sex with him.

It's a temporary glitch. Eventually, when your hormones level out and you actually manage to get some sleep, you do stop hating him, just as you also stop crying over Johnson & Johnson commercials and the memory of what your breasts used to look like.

But still, no one would fess up. Instead, they all looked at me as if I'd admitted I slipped cyanide into my husband's meatloaf, and then began to protest that babies actually bring spouses closer together. Which is just another big, fat lie, unless you find it a turn-on to be up together at 2 a.m. taking turns pacing around the nursery with a screaming infant.

Which, quite frankly, I do not.

The conversation then veered toward favorite methods of postpartum birth control.

"You don't have to worry about that until your baby is four to six weeks old, though," one of the seasoned moms reassured the new mom.

"Four to six weeks? Try four to six months," I scoffed.

Which reminded me of the conversation I had with my OB/GYN at my six-week check-up after Sam was born, when she asked what kind of birth control I'd like to use. When I stopped laughing and picked myself up off the floor, I said, "I have a six-week old. He's my birth control."

Posted 20 December 2005 at 02:00 PM