Bonding

I'm writing this here... because I posted it somewhere where a mother was scared and confused and sad because she hadn't bonded with her baby and she thought something was wrong with her. It's a story I don't share that often, because even now I'm a tad bit ashamed of it. It's different, but I still worry people will judge me for it or think less of me as a parent. But... it was someone else telling me something fairly similar that made me realize that how I felt was okay and, gasp, even NORMAL. So, when I've told other parents this, normally semi-privately, many have expressed gratitude that someone finally validated their feelings and shared something like this.

It might be a hard read. It was a hard experience. I hope my wife doesn't kill me for posting this, I haven't even told her some of it, but she lived it, so she must know. And I hope she can surely attest that it's done a complete 180 and that Sam is my darling.

Here is what I wrote...

Also, my second child was FOUR MONTHS OLD before I actually loved him. I was ambivalent about having a second child, and he was a very VERY difficult baby. I adored my first child with an intensity that borders on addiction, and I couldn't imagine replicating that. Everyone told me I would. So when it didn't happen, I thought that obviously something was wrong with one of us. And since i loved Charlie so much, then it must be Sam that's defective. EVERYONE told me that I would love my children the same, and I didn't.
It wasn't until another mother (of 3) told me that she loved her second child more than the other two, that I started to step back and look at things. I will NEVER love Sam like Charlie because Sam ISN'T Charlie. Charlie was my first, Charlie is much like me, I nursed Charlie (yes, non-bio moms can nurse), but Sam refused to nurse even from his bio-mommy (months of feeding therapy and lactation consultants finally just became pumping... so he got the milk, but rarely the boob), Charlie had a severe illness that put him in the hospital frequently, and I was always the one doing overnights. My bond with Charlie was forged through pain and fear in many way (I spent a lot of the first two years of his life worrying he was about to die). I was also the SAHM when Charlie was born but we switched when Sam was born. So there were strikes against me but I was so convinced, because EVERYONE had told me that once he was born, all my doubts would disappear and I would adore him just as much as the first, that something was horribly wrong. If moms had been HONEST that bonding ISN'T automatic, that sometimes it takes days or months, I would have beat myself up a lot less and would have loved him sooner I think. But our lives, Sam and I, were miserable for quite some time. You could have taken any other child and replaced him and I wouldn't have really cared. I was willing to put the kid up for adoption, I was that detached from him. But I CARED for him. I went through the motions. I fed and changed and rocked and swaddled and sang. But once, shortly before the tipping point, I left him on our bed to scream because it was at that exact moment that I realized why people shake babies, and I knew that I was not capable of caring for him at that moment. I called my sister hysterical, convinced that I hated this child and would never love him. Eventually, I went and picked him up because LOGIC told me that I had to comfort him and calm him, but it wasn't LOVE driving that. Love didn't drive his care from me for months.
Do I sound like a callous bitch? Probably. But when I finally began to talk about this, I realized it's a LOT more common than people realize, because women are so ashamed to admit it, convinced other people will think they're monsters or bad mothers. I wasn't a bad mother to Sam, I was a detached mother. He was always warm and clean and well fed, I cared for him, I just couldn't nurture him.
So, what happened? Well, when I had my epiphany that my children ARE NOT THE SAME PEOPLE and therefore I will never, ever love them exactly the same, it was like a floodgate opened and I realized I DID love Sam, but I was holding it back because since it wasn't what everyone claimed it would be, it was inferior. It was like having two favorite books, loving them both for completely different reasons but not loving one more than the other.
Sam is now 2y3m and I adore him. I love both my children, equally and unequally. I love Charlie more than Sam and Sam more than Charlie. I can't imagine my life without him. He's amazing and perfect and fabulous. It happened, in time. But there is no timeline and for some people it might never happen. That doesn't make you a bad person or a bad mother.


At the end of the day, love is a verb. Love is an action. If you are providing for your child and meeting her needs and not being cruel to her, you've got more on a lot of parents. It's okay not to bond immediately, it doesn't mean it will never happen. Just because a marriage wasn't " love at first sight" doesn't mean it can't be "till death do us part."