I’m Touched out

Laura Stocks - 19 Mar 19

You carry, hug, stroke, kiss, feed, rock, wipe on repeat 365 days a year. You lock yourself in the downstairs loo for just a chance of having a wee in peace. You’re juggling flexible working, with running the home, remembering book bags, water bottles and named tupperware on Tuesday and costume for assembly on Thursday. You’re answering emails, updating social media, sorting pressies for parties that make your ears ring and sourcing cheap tat to make an Easter bonnet. Your days are full, but rarely with things that make YOU tick or on your terms.

So if the mini people actually allow you to crawl into bed on your own in the evening, you can take a breath. Actually sink into the sheets – which lets be honest don’t have a sniff of fresh laundry smell left on them because you changed them so bloody long ago – but everything is quiet and still. It’s just you enveloped by cool sheets and your body feels heavy as fuck. And this, THIS is the time that you used to get jiggy with the Hubs?! Not a hope in hell… this time is YOUR time.

You are officially touched out. This feeling is REAL. But what I think is even more exhausting is the constant predicament that you find yourself in about the touch.

At 5pm, you are touched out to the max, desperate for bed time to come around so you can get some peace and eat something that’s not their leftovers or doable with one hand. But then tiniest human wakes at 2am for a feed and as he nuzzles in and you can feel his breath steady, cheek to chest & all is suddenly OK again with the world. But then said tiny human wakes again way earlier than 7am (the time forever etched as the aim without even a glimmer of hope) and you’re over it. Yet again though, the older mini humans wake up with the trusty gro clock and you are all embraces, being the first to welcome their day.

Fast forward through kissing ailments, snuggles on the sofa, piggy backs, in and out the high chair, school runs, constant negotiations of things to be done and being ignored and BAM, you’re back hiding in the loo again.

As a species, we yearn for belonging and togetherness. But the notion of being touched out is one that seems to be ever present right now. The need to just be. To be able to listen to our own thoughts and listen to our own needs. And intimacy with our partners, it so often falls to the very bottom of the priority list. I think sex is like chocolate – the more you have it, the more you want it. So having it fall off the radar whilst we’re dealing with all the other physical and intimate demands of motherhood, means that we actually stop yearning for that type of intimacy.

And then work this one out… I had a morning off from the kids and I had a massage. I essentially chose to have someone else touching me (wtaf?). But that’s when I realised that actually touch is such an essential connection. As much as we can say we are ‘touched out’, we too crave all those same things that our children are asking from us. To feel held, to feel heard, to feel soothed, to feel loved and to feel safe. So I get it… I get why our children demand so much physical touch from us and I will try to continue to demonstrate that love & stability for them.

I guess we as mothers just need to make sure that we are taking whatever measures we need to, to make that doable and not a complete drain on our sanity & our mental health. And as for the sex… well lets just say I look forward to it becoming a part of our intrinsic being again and until then, I’ll settle for a plonk on the sofa in front of ‘This is Us’ before crashing out. Because this at the moment is US and above anything else, I’m so grateful this is my reality.

Laura Stocks

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