Parenthood isn’t the end of intimacy

Goodbye sex and spontaneity, hello texts about bin bags. Yet being a parent brings a gloriously unexpected intimacy,

Being a parent isn’t all sparse sex and texts about bin bags, says Stuart Heritage

FACEBOOK’S TIMEHOP IS REALLY DOING A NUMBER

ON ME. Five years ago today, it says, my wife and I had snuck away for an impromptu romantic weekend in Paris. Four years ago we were in Tallinn, wrapped up warm against the blasting cold in a hodgepodge postsoviet café. Three years ago we were in Reykjavik, and I proposed, and she said yes.

You should see us in those photos. We look so young, and thin, and clean, and we had so much time. We could linger over long lunches, or visit museums, or just wake up and see where our days would take us. We were in love, and people could tell, because it’s easy to look like you’re in love when you haven’t got a baby.

This is why Timehop doesn’t have a photo from two years ago. We were a fortnight away from having our son, oblivious to the line in the sand he’d come to represent. On one side: holidays and leisure and spontaneity. On the other: exhaustion and military planning and the reluctant abandonment of escalators as a viable mode of transportation.

Looked at objectively, one of these sides is much better for a relationship. If you’ve got freedom, there are no barriers to intimacy. You can go out, or stay up, or get drunk, or have sex, or just experience the world through the prism of your partner. When it’s whipped away from you, it stings.

DRINKING ISN’T FUN AS A PARENT, because we know the baby will be up and clamouring for attention before 6am. Holidays have become incredibly limited in scope and budget. Sex, when it happens, is a miracle of aligned schedules and fended-off tiredness. Especially in the early days, we came off less as a couple and more a tag team in service of a minuscule dictator.

It’s rare to find the three of us in the same room. A lot of the time, if one of us has the baby, it means that the other can work, clean, cook or sleep before we swap back again. We’ve become shift workers, the long declarative conversations of courtship replaced with functional texts about needing bin bags.

But here’s the thing. As much as we once managed to convince ourselves that we had an unbreakable, once-ina-lifetime connection, now we actually do. Now it’s symbiotic. We’ve become a two-headed parenting unit, a model of seamless care. We’ve learned to compensate for each other’s weaknesses (her: procrastination; me: control freakery) and underpin each other’s strengths (her: patience; me: being able to do everything brilliantly by myself all the time), and our reliance on one another is total. And, weirdly, this is more intimate than anything I’ve ever experienced.

Because in the middle of it all is this boy; this funny, curious, beaming little boy who screams with delight whenever you walk into a room. Who just stole three bottles of milk from the fridge and named them after us. Whose first instinct, when he caught us hugging in a recent moment of grief, was to rush over and join in. I’m so proud of him and, by extension, I’m so proud of us. Our lives have shrunk to a dot since he arrived, but all our energy has gone into nurturing the three of us as a family unit. We might not go away any more, or wander around rapt in ourselves, or know how a single song in the charts goes, but it doesn’t really matter. Because we made this instead. We made it together.

There’s no Timehop entry from two years ago, but there is one from last year. It’s a photo of our son, 11 months old, casually leaning against the arm of our sofa with a colossal grin all over his face. My wife showed it to me, and we both silently sat there for a moment or two, dazed that we had it in us to create something quite that beautiful. You know what? You can keep your holidays.

“We might not go away anymore… but it doesn’t really matter. We made this instead”