When The Walls Have Ears

What can you do when your children hear you having sex? This one time, in the bedroom… the MamaSutra dealt with it. 

There are fewer things more embarrassing to parents than having their child walk in on them having sex. I hear time and time again that this is one of many parents biggest fears — so much so that some parents won’t have sex if their kids are awake or anywhere within earshot. So,  what are parents to do if they’re feeling very passionate toward one another on a lazy Saturday morning?

If you don’t live in a house that separates master bedroom from the rest of the bedrooms in the house, my advice would be to experiment with sound proofing. Playing music or turning on the TV for background noise can be a great distractor from that perspective — as long as it does not distract YOU. Put this in place and use it regularly so it doesn’t become suspect when you need it. Then you have systems in place to safeguard the sounds of your lovemaking. Otherwise, you’re all going to need a great sense of humor.

Case in point:

Recently, it was one of those lazy Saturday mornings in my household… but I did NOT have soundproofing in place. I do listen to music as I wake up but this particular morning I did not. It was cozy in my bed and my partner and I were talking and laughing as we slowly woke up. We were two happy souls together in a cozy bed, our hands began to roam the soft landscape of hard bodies, and eventually, we got to the part where skin was hitting skin.

My girls sleep in the room adjacent to mine with a partial shared wall. Not long after we began to rumple the foreskin, my partner froze and said breathlessly that he thought the kids were calling me. I called out of the room, “What? Did you call me?”

Marcia, my oldest, called out in an annoyed tone: “Mo-o-o-om, we can hear you.”

“‘Hear us what?” I said.

Laughing, and a little sarcastic, Marcia said: “Really? You’re gonna make me say it?”

Steve and I snickered quietly (me out out of embarrassment), and then I suggested, “Why don’t you go downstairs to watch TV?”

“Because we can hear you from there too,” Marcia replied.

That made the two of us giggle again. I dismounted to lay beside him and changed positions to give him a hand job to maintain his erection and proceeded quietly.  At that point Steve turned to me and, with a mischievious smile, whispered, “Can you hear me now?”

This made me laugh hysterically. I wanted to repeat the question to the girls so I asked loudly, “Can you hear me now?” Marcia started to answer, but couldn’t finish because she was laughing herself, then added in that typical t’ween ugh-parents-are-so-ridiculous-tone, “I don’t wanna think about it.”

Steve and I finished quietly having sex, probably the quietest we’ve ever been — no one has ever objected before — and it was immensely pleasurable. In terms of female copulatory vocalizations (aka “oh baby,” “yeah right there,” etc), I do not scream from the roof tops when the house is occupied, but I’m also not completely mum.

And I do not have intercourse in front of my children either. I don’t leave my door wide open and I have trained my girls to knock when a door is closed. We also don’t live in Mangaia where the extended family lives in one room and sex in the same room is the norm. My house is not large and my kids are not small — we exist together in a small space and that’s okay. Being sexual is also okay. I do think it’s healthy to normalize happy, adult sexuality to children; we do this through conversation.

I’m grateful that my kids have a sense of humor about sex. That is exactly the attitude I’ve wanted to foster in my household. Sex is funny, and we don’t need to be secretive about it. At the same time, because no one really needs to hear everything going on in the privacy of a bedroom (i.e. they didn’t give their consent to have to listen to it) soundproofing is a good idea.

Watch Lanae tell this story:

Have you been caught before? How did you handle it? How do you prevent it?