Prioritizing our sexual connection has been one of the most valuable moves my partner and I have made, as both partners and parents. But when we brought our newborn baby home, sex was the last thing on either of our minds. We had been through a dayslong ordeal, I was physically wrecked, and neither of us had slept. Still, it felt strange, walking into our home and, for weeks, not reaching for each other.

For many couples, sex takes a back burner when kids arrive. If we weren’t people who feel connection through sex, maybe we would have just let it go. But we are, and I missed feeling a tether to my partner. I was giving so much care to our new baby that I felt strangely invisible in our house, a lumbering apparition leaking milk and trailing crumbs in my wake. I didn’t know how to be a sexual person and a parent, which is fair, because nothing in life prepares you for that.

I am a former sex worker and a person who has done a lot of direct healing work on my sexuality. Still, it was a strange thing to find my body employed at so many various jobs — to become a generalist. My body used to be a specialist, tasked with activities like washing and feeding myself, going to work, exercising, and having sex. Those were its roles. As a parent, however, my body and I were suddenly asked to be competent and vigorous at a wide variety of labor. One moment, I was holding my child and feeding them from my body. The next moment, I was scrubbing a toilet, then slicing strawberries, then giving a blow job. The head spins.

As it turned out, it did not take as long as I feared for us to find each other again. My body healed, and the feel of us together went back to being unequivocally good. The challenge, though, was logistics. For us, it was figuring out how to have sex silently, on two hours of sleep, with a child napping in the next room.

Dying to know how black-diamond level our privacy situation was, relatively speaking, I reached out to some parent friends to tentatively ask how they have been managing. Many parents told me that the only way to get alone time with their partner was when their baby or child was napping: “90% of the time was during her naps with a baby monitor,” a North Carolina mom told me. My pal Mary Simpson, who lives in an old-school Brooklyn loft (meaning their whole place is one giant room), has had to get creative with her partner. “We have to be scheduled about it, but we find no loss in erotics by making a plan.” She and her partner both work from home, which is helpful in the effort to connect, organically or otherwise, during the day, but before their child started preschool, their options were “very quietly in the bathroom or on the other side of the loft during nap time.”

As our own child grew into a toddler, the setup got more complex. She wasn’t old enough to safely leave unmonitored but didn’t sleep through the night and strongly preferred to nap on one of our bodies. The only times my partner and I could reliably find each other were in the late nights and the still-dark early mornings. At times, it took some scheduling before we managed to connect. But once our reeling from the disruption to our connection slowed enough, we were able to make space for a new, differently shaped bond.

I didn’t know how to be a sexual person and a parent, which is fair, because nothing in life prepares you for that.

Since then, we have loosely established that we adults have “private time” in our room on weekend mornings, and sometimes in the middle of a weekday (WFH FTW). To build a sex-positive household in which the grownups get laid regularly and healthy adult connection is modeled for the children, the concept of privacy is a crucial foundation. In our family, the overarching rule is that everyone gets privacy when and how they ask for it, no questions asked. You want to change in your room? We support you. You want to close the door to the bathroom? We support you. You want alone time? We support you. Because our kids are familiar with this language and this concept — someone wanting to be free from observation — it is simple to apply that to the adults. Just like you sometimes want to be in your room alone, sometimes we want to be in our room alone. There isn’t any intrigue attached to it, and no one is particularly curious.

Of course, sometimes hilarity ensues. I have had the less than stellar experience of being in bed with my man and hearing my kid holler “Mom” down the hallway at the exact moment you least want to be interrupted by a child. My partner has had to throw clothes on and go make more snacks midf*ck. A sense of humor is useful here.

This kind of chaotic paradigm, reality for many new parents, can be either a total buzzkill or a fun — dare I say sexy? — game.

My partner and I enjoy a robust and mutual attraction to each other that spans the sexual, the sensual, and the companionate. Would that feel the same if we had unfettered access to each other? Maybe. I don’t know, because there are always kids in the way when I want to f*ck him.

I see him, stirring a pot of noodles, and I want a piece of that, but we have to wait, and we spend the rest of the day grabbing each other’s butts. It’s fun. For us, sex is important as much more than momentary pleasure; it is the conduit between us. There is a certain deliciousness, reminiscent of a teenage crush, to having to wait those hours or sometimes even days to be together. As we labor to get our kids tucked in for the night and our house in some semblance of order, we both know that, if we can stay awake (and that is a big if), we can find each other in bed.

Margo Steines is the author of BRUTALITIES: A Love Story. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Slate, The New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. A native New Yorker, Steines lives in Arizona with her family, where she teaches creative nonfiction writing classes and seminars.