We currently live in a three-bedroom dwelling. We also have three children. Given the fact that me and my husband cohabitate in one room that leaves two rooms for three children. We have the youngest in a small room by herself, and the two older children share a bigger bedroom. We tried many constellations of bedrooms before this final solution. In fact, it seemed like we were moving beds around every weekend. So for the sake of mostly my husbands sanity, because let’s be honest he was the ones doing these things, we made one last move. This being the ideal situation because the middle child was no longer smothering the baby and the baby was no longer screaming and waking the oldest up.

The thing about this newest bedroom situation is that the middle child really seems to hit her stride early evening when it’s time to start preparing for bed. While my eldest can be peacefully dozing my middle child is making dinosaur noises playing with the lights and doing belly flops onto his delightfully slumbering face. And so we must utilize all of the bedrooms in order to get the three children asleep in separate places and then move the oldest from our bed back to his once the middle child has fallen asleep. Initially we would put The middle child to sleep in our bed but we got real tired real fast of having her totally trashing our room at the end of each day. Thus we decided that the oldest would go to sleep in our bed because he’s generally not jumping off my dresser, or taking all the books off my bookshelf, or using all of the film in my old cameras. These are in fact real-life scenarios from the archives of the middle child.

This means for a period of time each evening my bedroom is not accessible to myself or my husband, and so even if I were very sick, or very tired, I do not have access to my bedroom. This perpetually exhausts me. When you’re a kid you look forward to being an adult and all of the freedom that that means for you. Then you have kids and realize nothing is actually yours, you have no freedom, no personal space, and no personal belongings.

So now it’s real life, the future where you are an adult, and you just really want to have marital relations with your husband, but guess what you’re not. You’re on the couch reading to each other, or playing a game, or folding 18 loads of laundry before you can go to your bedroom move a child back to his room (you have your husband do because when you do it usually smack the kids head off and door frame), and hope that the both of you still have the stamina to do the deed.

Here’s the deal if I had it my way would get it daily nightly and ever so rightly (thank you Scrubs season one for that great quote). I recently read something that said that most women (whatever that means) need to have an emotional connection to be the precursor to sexual relations. So, for example, you would need to feel loved or appreciated by your husband or have had him contribute in the house during the day before you would be able to muster up the desire for intercourse. That’s not me. I just need to be awake and in capacity of most of my facilities and have my husband in the same room with no children.

All of that being said I’m sure you’re wondering why if the kids were in our bedroom why we wouldn’t just get it on in another room of the house. Here in lies the number one downfall of community life. When you live with a whole bunch of people in your house anyone could walk into your living room or kitchen at any period of time for any reason. It could be because they want to know what’s for dinner tomorrow, or to make a vacation request, or because the snow is falling and they don’t know where their winter boots are, or because they think that in the third grade that they dated Harry Potter for a year and you would like them to confirm that fact for you even though that is clearly not what happened. So with that information, you understand I like really need access to my bedroom. And yet I don’t. I am out here on the couch playing Unstable Unicorns with my husband for the fourth time this week. And I don’t really think there’s a resolution on this topic other than to let you know if you find yourself in a similar position I feel you-you are not alone in your struggles. I fight the good fight by your side.