by Jeannine Parvati Baker, reprinted with permission from Hygiea College, Box 398-JT, Monroe, UT 84754

Jeannine Parvati Baker was a perinatal psychologist, post-shamanic midwife, and an intuitive astrologer with specialties in dreams, sexuality, fertility, conscious conception, freebirth, lotus birth, lactation, family bed, homeschool, natural home healthcare/herbalism, co-custody, ceremonies, and celebrations. She died in 2005 but her work lives on the BirthKeeper.org site.

In 1996, Jeannine sent me this article in response to querying her about her thinking on the subject of men’s leaving when kids were born. Her words were part of what inspired my article “Why Men Leave” (Appendix A) first published in in a rougher form in our Winter 1997 Wellness Associates Journal. —Jack

Nursing mothers are notorious for their disinclination toward sex—and no wonder when, for most women, giving birth is not the ecstatic culmination of nine months of foreplay. For most women childbirth is a painful ordeal—so why repeat it again so soon by inviting another conception through sex? I believe the desire for sex after giving birth is mitigated by how the baby was born, but there is more to the mystery. Even in the non-traumatized population of mothers having babies at home, most nursing mothers feel burdened to some degree since their mates’ sexual desire is usually more frequent. This has been explained hormonally—that a lactating woman has a baby and does not desire sex because her lap is already full with the biological imperative actualized. The message (hormone means “messenger” in Greek) is, “why have sex now when the consequence of intercourse is already here?”

However, there is a population of mothers who do desire sex after birth and almost as frequently as their mates—they are the freebirth community. A freebirth is when a couple gives birth as an expression of their sexual love rather than a medically surveilled event with the paid paranoid in attendance, either doctor or midwife. A couple who claims the full responsibility of their sexual love by birthing their baby in privacy becomes more responsible, that is better able to respond to the child’s life thereafter. They have not given their power away to the institution to rescue them from the natural consequence of heterosexuality. Yet even in this group, some of the nursing mothers feel confused about their husband’s desire for erotic communication. They are in love with their mates, but some of the mothers are just not up to the frequency of sex their mates’ desire.

I think this has something to do with a relatively new event for humans—generations of bottle-fed men are becoming fathers. When they see their wives nursing, these men are unconsciously stimulated into an erotic response based on unmet infantile needs. The mother senses this and becomes confused—her breasts are sexual yet when lactating, the sexuality experienced is of another dimension than the sexuality with her husband. A man who was not nursed generally focuses on his lover’s breasts as erogenous, whereas a man who was nursed fully is attracted primarily to his lover’s genitalia, buttocks, and hips-to-waist differential. As the man becomes a father, his unfinished sexual business is evoked as he begins again the primal journey. Reliving his own gestation, birth, and (lack of) lactation through his lover, the mother of his child, some men become obsessed with the breast full of milk as the most erotic part of his lover’s body. The minority of men who had their full measure of mother’s milk when it was needed, in infancy and into the toddler years, relate to the mother of their child as their lover, not primarily as their own phantom mother. A bottlefed man did not learn the give and take of sexuality-at-breast as relationship, but instead imprinted upon an object rather than a woman as source of nourishment. He was primally disappointed and lost a basic trust in the feminine, which colors his view of all women, particularly this woman, when he becomes a father himself (the mother of his child)….

My thesis is that mature sexuality has integrated primal wounds, for without bringing the imprints of sexuality into awareness and consciously choosing which patterns to interrupt, there are a host of consequences to endure. The prevailing issue leading to divorce is sexual disharmony (and the sequela, adultery). This often is brought about after a baby is conceived and/or birthed.

The men’s movement has been instrumental in bringing out men’s stories as they become fathers. Over and again is heard the tale of sexual rejection—men feeling shut out of the loving twosome of the mother and baby bond. I posit this is largely the response to an earlier rejection—by their own mothers, which, from a baby’s point-of-view, is primal sexual rejection. This is displaced upon the wife who then is manipulated into rejecting her husband’s sexual advances. She is manipulated by the way her husband comes onto her sexually—with confused signals. Here he is, the father of her baby, acting more like a baby than her lover and wanting her to fill a need that optimally should have been met a generation ago by his own mother.

What I hope to evoke with this article is compassion based on a new understanding of how primal psychology colors sexuality. For a long time mothers have felt guilty for not arising erotically to their husband’s desires after the children come…. A woman can come to understand that if her mate wasn’t breastfed by a sexually mature woman, he, himself, may be as responsible for her disinclination toward having sex now as she is.

The way I see it, we are in this procreation journey together. There are as many mysteries of the masculine to discover as there are mysteries of the feminine. Monogamy is the crucible for this enlightening mix of genders. With trust and honest communication we can become partners-in-love as parents. Within the healing journey may be excursions to the past, the primal unmet needs of either or both of the parents. These museum tours of pain are important to explore for the evolution of the possible family, for it is a rare child who is cared for in a whole way and allowed to nurse for several years based on her needs…. If both partners show compassion, we can come together free of the old patterns of sexuality that inhibit our mature, human sexuality and fullness of joy.