There’s a lot that no one tells you about life after kids. Everyone warns you about the sleepless nights and the chaos, but no one says: “Hey, your sex life might crash and burn too.” Not just the logistics—timing, exhaustion, people under four feet tall interrupting at the worst moment—but the deeper stuff. The stuff that lingers long after your body “heals.”
For me, it wasn’t the stretch marks, the body changes, or even the fear of going “down under” again. I was the problem. Yep. Me. I’ll own it. I didn’t just feel different—I was different. I didn’t want sex. Not like, “Oh, not tonight, babe, I’m tired,” but more like, “Wait…do I even like sex anymore?” The girl who used to love it—who was adventurous and flirty and could make a trucker blush—was gone. Straight-up ghosted me.
And I wish I could say time healed all wounds. But no, babe. I could’ve waited five years and still felt like a cold piece of sourdough. This isn’t a “just wait it out” story. And it isn’t a “just buy the lingerie and a fancy vibrator” fix either. Because trust me, I tried. Lace, candles, lingerie that was too small and made me want to cry—I tried it all. But I still felt like I was watching someone else’s life from the sidelines.
And then… smut. Not even kidding. Smut saved me. I didn’t go looking for it—it found me. I was deep in my postpartum haze after baby number two, wandering a bookstore like it was a spa day, and I turned a corner. BAM. There it was: The Ritual by Shantel Tessier.
I devoured it. And then I devoured The Sinner. I didn’t realize what was happening at first. It wasn’t just the spicy scenes, though, let’s be honest, Shantel brought the heat. It was the emotions. The intensity. The playfulness. The unapologetic ownership of pleasure. I missed that version of me. And reading about
these wild, fictional adventures started stirring things I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted to try things. I wanted to talk about things. And my husband? Oh, he was ready. The man practically threw his phone across the room when I said, “So I read this scene and…”
Now let’s keep it real—it wasn’t all fireworks and Fifty Shades reenactments. There were awkward moments. There was laughter. Some things felt better in the books. But somewhere in that messy, funny, sexy rediscovery, I found myself again. The naked giggles. The teasing. The freedom to be vulnerable and silly and raw and me.
It wasn’t about the sex. It was about feeling something again. Connecting. Playing. Reading gave me that bridge. It gave me the courage to stop being so in my head, so stuck in motherhood and survival mode, and reconnect with the woman underneath it all.
So no, you can’t Amazon Prime your sex life back to life. But Kindle Unlimited? That’s a damn good place to start.
