Hi @Scottishfunk
I’m so sorry to hear what you’ve been going through. It’s pretty heartbreaking.
Becoming a father can be a really difficult time I hear you loud and clear on this. I think you should be proud you‘ve been able to reach out and talk about this openly.
My wife & I also had a virtually sexless marriage for a few years after childbirth, and for much of the pregnancy. We‘re fortunate in being in a much, much better place all round now, but it took work. After a few rounds of therapy and lots of talking we‘re getting close to how we were before we became parents. The feelings of losing the intimate side of our relationship has mostly reversed.
I don‘t know how or if our experience might relate to yours, but hopefully some part of it might perhaps help you both in some small way. I‘m hoping you‘ll take away a feeling that things can get better.
TRIGGER WARNING:
Birth trauma.
Our story is one of a traumatic birthing: a back-to-back, foreceps delivery with episiotomy following a very long labour.
We‘re in no doubt that in our case the 'miracle‘ of childbirth was only made possible through surgical intervention. I’ll spare the full details of the horrors of this procedure, but for those who‘ve been through it, the word 'episiotomy‘ has the power to make the blood run cold.
The labour, the traumatic birth itself and the first few days, weeks and months after were all in their own way sheer hell for my wife. And in turn I felt frustrated and miserable that I couldn’t help her more.
Following the birth, the initial buzz of visitors, and cards, gifts and flowers; the long periods of sleeplessness and the physical trauma took their toll on my wife. She was convinced, eventually to visit the doctor to speak about her mental health.
Our GP took, I’m, how to put this?… an educated guess?, after a brief consultation, that she had Post Natal Depression, prescribed her antidepressants, and sent her away.
We decided (with the help of family) to invest in a few sessions with a private therapist, as it became clear the antidepressants weren’t helping, and the GP had simply offered a different antidepressant when we went back.
The therapist fairly quickly decided the signs were pointing to a diagnosis of PTSD, and that depression was a secondary, and more minor issue to the high levels of anxiety my wife was going through on a daily basis.
After years of several excellent NHS and private therapies, my wife has journeyed back to get to a place where she’s no longer triggered by certain kinds of physical touch, has a true sense of agency over her own body again, and has trust that sex will be pleasurable for her. Another change is that she‘s got back to feeling she has more personal space again, as our little one is a bit older and more independent now.
My wife has also found childcare exhausting, and found it hard to cope with my emotional needs on top of her own and our child’s, just like @Saffron18 described.
In our relationship, the bulk of the ‘emotional labour’ of parenting and family life has usually been taken on by my wife. In her more precarious mental states, this was too much for her to carry, and even thinking about going through the emotional highs and lows of sex as well.
I did‘t understand at the time why my wife wouldn‘t touch me. Why she was having trouble with physical touch by me, and why every suggestion of sex felt like an unwanted pressure for her.
I felt rejected. I felt hurt. I was deeply frustrated.
It took a chat with a therapist to validate my desires and expectations, and help me find better ways to communicate with my wife about sex, without pressuring her. One simple example of this advice is making sure we‘re not undressed or in bed, when opening up these conversations. I also learned more on how to really listen to and interpret what she was telling me, to make her feel validated, and support her.
Support works both ways of course. I really don’t think it’s okay for my wife to belittle or shame my kinks, desires and fantasies. She doesn’t have to indulge if she doesn’t want to, of course, but I do expect her to respect my feelings when I open up and share my thoughts. Constant rejections and micro-rejections without explanation can be hurtful too.
My wife didn‘t always feel able to talk to me about what she was feeling at her lowest moments.
She felt she couldn‘t go there, with the result that her default response was to close down the discussion in the quickest way she could.
Various therapists helped my wife to really open up and speak about what she’d been feeling. About the huge pressures she’d put herself under, like feeling she had to always be ‘strong’ and ‘succeed’ as a mother. About her (unjustified) feelings that she was failing at both.
Negative intrusive thoughts, low self-esteem, exhaustion, and all the feelings of being unable to cope, contributed to her having a really low sex drive for a long time.
There’s a happy ending to our story. We’ve got so much of our lives back by working through my wife’s trauma, and crucially her crisis of trust and confidence, with the help of therapists. We’ve also done a lot of work in really talking about our relationship in every sense. And we’re closer and stronger now for working together on this.
The intimacy part has followed quite naturally after a time, in part because we’ve spent so much time looking out for each other, being close. It feels like we’ve re-discovered ourselves and each other in the process.
Being a parent can be tough. Really, really, really tough sometimes (especially the early years), but I do hope you and your wife can pull together, and be kind to each other, whatever difficulties you‘re both facing.
I can totally recommend the therapy route, if talking to each other isn’t working for some reason. Talking therapies have helped us. The waiting lists are long at the moment, but just being on the list always helped us feel that we‘ve been moving in a positive direction.
Hope things improve for you soon. 
, buckets of hugs 
at this point we’d already not had sex for about 3 1/2 years so to blame not being intimate because of this was crazy!
