Oh I loved my son madly deeply insanely from the get go. I think everything I have and am today I owe to him, including my sanity.
SimpSon (?–was going to call him Bart, but I guess that would be my brother?) was born in distress, my water broke and it was VERY UGLY COLOURS*, and then after 2 hours of hard contractions and ZERO dialation they decided I needed a C-section. Time from water break to Baby in the World was about 3 hours 11 minutes.
He had several medical problems, I almost lost him 4 times in the first 5 days of life, and I remember being FEROCIOSLY ANGRY at anyone who did anything to hurt him. I am a nurse, but I remember wanting to choke the living shit out of anyone putting an IV in him. I spent a lot of time trying to get access to him in NICCU and trying to get people to tell me what was wrong with him. It was such a mercy when we went to Children’s Hospital of Western Ontario and I could stay in his PICCU room as much as I wanted. He was ill. I was ill, my section opened up, I had a raging infection, but I stayed near him at least 18 hours a day. I loved him so much that just going to the cafeteria to eat would cause me to cry from missing him. (Ok I had a bit of post partum weirdness going on, but still…)My biggest fear was that the birth trauma had affected his brain/neurological systems… however he is almost 6 years old and making billingual puns, so Im not worried… well… he did tell his class that his best friend is his computer, and he would rather watch Discovery Channel than almost anything… so Im worried more about his social skills than his intellect.
So for me, yes, but I know it doesnt always happen that way.
*Kind of like the frog in a blender…three days later joke…
SIL hates breastfeeding. The only thing she likes about it is that it makes her breasts stop hurting, but other than that it’s not something she looks forward to.
This was similar for my wife… she had an emergency c-section and had some complications, so the first 6 months or so were miserable.
She loves our little girl to bits now of course, but she still worries sometimes that she didn’t have that “rush” of love you’re supposed to get.
I think I was more fascinated when daughter was first born, but the love has grown and grown the more we’re got to know her.
Having said that, last night at 4.30am when we were up for the third time to settle her we’d have gladly followed **QtM **and Shirely Ujest and done a quick deal with a passing band of gypsies / medical researchers!
Nope, not at all. I had an overwhelming need to protect her and I knew from the moment I saw her that I would cheerfully kill for her, or die for her, if it came to it. I needed to look after her, but what I felt early on wasn’t love, not really. It came gradually (I wasn’t freaked, actually, I assumed it would) and there’s no one moment where it clicked. I just knew at some point that the love was there along with the mommabearness.
Up to the actual birth, I had no idea what to expect or what to feel or what it was going to be like. But when they handed me my daughter – so tiny (5 lbs 6 oz), still covered in goo, and not crying or complaining but clearly trying to make sense of the strange, bright, cold, scary, new world she found herself in – there was an immediate sense of “this is mine and I must protect her”, a fierceness of love I was unprepared for.
And even in those dark nights when she wouldn’t stop crying and I was in tears myself from exhaustion, I would look at her and say “You are a joy”. It is a weird, inexplicable feeling and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
From the moment the strip turned blue, I felt responsible for “it”, as I then thought about my son. But I was mildly depressed at the time, and that made that responsibility a bit joyless: “I can’t take those painkillers, even if my toothache is killing me, because that drug isn’t proven safe, and if my son is damaged, it will negatively impact the rest of all our lives”. Gloomy, eh? I mean, I could also have thought:“I don’t take this painkiller because I love my baby”, right?
When my son was born, I was pleasantly surprised at how beautiful I thought he was. I had impacted for the typical ugly red grey dirty toothless little old man-kind of baby, and in retrospect, my son WAS all that. But I remember thinking, in that operating room while they showed me my son and were still sewing me up, " Gee, he isn’t that ugly at all, and kinda sweet".
From then on, my love had the form of wanting the best for him, to want him to be comfortable in every way. I didn’t enjoy myself, but I didn’t begrudge my baby anything. And I often felt proud of him for doing so well while being so new at everything and so helpless. I even admired his ability to poop so well, or find the nipple on his own, or not to freak out in the bath. That sort of thing. I grew to like my son a lot in that time: he was just so brave and so content.
That took me throught the first four months. And that’s just when my son lost the new-bornness and started to get really cute, and that helped even more.
Now I like and love him more and more the more of his own personality I discover. Last month, I discovered he liked to watch trains; or that he wants to hand his food to the cat. All those things make me love him more, as i discover more of the person he is.
Here he is now!
I just wanted to say thanks to all those that have replied to this thread so far. I’m 20 weeks pregnant, after fighting very hard to actually get pregnant, and have been getting more and more worried that I’ll have problems bonding with him when he arrives. I have a history of depression, and although haven’t been depressed for a while, it’s a worry. I’ve also been feeling mostly ambivalent about things so far, which I’m struggling to understand, but I don’t know it this is a result of the infertility and stress that that put me and my husband under.
I hope that I will bond with my baby as soon as I see him, but at least it is comforting to know that it is not the end of the world if I don’t.
That’s why they make babies, puppies, and kittens cute, and explains the historically sluggish market in having maggots as pets.
We loved MilliCal at once, in spite of her enormous feet.
I’m another one who took awhile to truly bond with my daughter. My experiences echoed a lot of what other people have said here. My initial response to her was mostly one of bewilderment and unrealness. And then I got her home and the new reality of my life started to set in, and the post-partum depression took off. I remember thinking, “what the hell have I done?” All freedom gone–my life was gone (or so I felt at the time).
Add to it that I was trying to breastfeed, but I wasn’t sleeping (even when I had the chance), and I wasn’t eating–I was just horribly, horribly strung out. So I wasn’t coming up with a lot of milk. And baby wasn’t latching! She wouldn’t eat! Which made me even more stressed out, which reduced my milk even more, etc. Vicious cycle.
So yeah, possibly the worst couple of weeks in my life. But then my mom forced me to go back to the doctor and tell him what was going on, he gave me some happy pills, I got some sleep, and gave up breastfeeding. Lo and behold, my life suddenly got a million times better. From the moment the pills kicked in, I started to bond with with baby. Now, I easily consider her the best thing that has ever happened to me. She brings joy to my life every single day, and I love her more than I ever knew was possible. Even when she’s throwing a temper tantrum.
I’m due with a little boy in January, and I hoping to carry over some of the lessons I learned the first time around.
For what it’s worth, in retrospect, the worst part of the whole experience for me wasn’t necessarily the labor and the aftermath. It was the feeling that I was losing myself as a person. Here I was, unable even to sit up and I couldn’t get away from this bundle who wouldn’t stop screaming unless I (not my husband, not my family) held him against my skin. It’s totally selfish, but it’s hard to go from my space/your space to no space in a period of hours, especially when you’re in blinding pain. Knowing what I know now, though, I’m glad he seemed to recognize something in me that I didn’t initially recognize in him.
The weird dichotomy is that, no matter how much I resented my son and how much pain I was in, I felt violently protective. No matter how awful I felt, if he was crying, I wanted to find the source of his upset and destroy it with my bare hands. Just obliterate it. It didn’t matter if it was because my husband was holding him, because he was hungry or because he was just crying - I needed to find whatever it was and eliminate it.
I have never, ever in my life felt such violent and conflicting emotions.
My oldest daughter I loved, I think before she was even born. When I delivered and she was given to me it’s like we already had that bond. It was amazing. We are so close now, like sisters with a twenty year age difference. She’s my baby girl always.
My four year old was a different story altogether. It was several months before I felt anything but fear and unhappiness for her, and I felt so guilty but it was awful. She never slept, she didn’t seem to like me either and cried all the time. I didn’t know then, of course, that she had sensory processing issues. Her first year is a hazy dark cloud memory for me. But now I am fiercely protective and love her so much. I miss her when she’s in school and can’t wait until I can pick her up again. I never tire of her, even when she’s not in the best mood. She’s my little princess.
They held the baby up and spread its legs saying “and it’s a …” I took a blurry glance and said “boy?” I remember sinking back feeling relieved since that was what my husband wanted. “Um, try again”, says the midwife. “It’s a girl” I felt an all enveloping rush of warm orangey glow come over me - my little girl! I had no idea I wanted a girl. I never had another one and partly due to this strange double take on the emotions - had it been a boy would I have been like the posters above, with the kid gradually growing on me?
A lot of mothers I know didn’t get that feeling. Of course I only have a bit part in her life - she’s 100% Daddy’s Girl.
The bond I share with my little girl now is way, way stronger than what I felt at birth. At birth, there was something, sure, but now I love her for the person she is, rather than the thing she represents. Does that make sense?
I still have strong mourning feelings for the child we never knew, the first-trimester miscarriage. Oddly enough, it was probably less than two weeks after that child’s projected birth date that my wife, against incredible odds, got pregnant with the little Torqueling.
Not immediately. I had a snowball medical experience ending in emergency c-section, I hadn’t gotten to sleep in three days, and I was out of it when they handed my son to me. I think I thought, “Oh, neat.”, but my foremost memory of his first day is total exhaustion- we’d just settled down to finally sleep when a horrible nurse insisted he needed a full bath, waking both of us up. I cried.
I was terrified. I’d had no experience with babies at all, and didn’t know what I felt for this strange cuddly little alien. I remember walking the halls with him the second night, and thinking I’d die to protect him, but it wasn’t emotional.
I think it took about a week for love, and then gradually more and more in love since then. You’ll be fine, Neeps. How’s your pregnancy going? We’re almost halfway there!
Even though today is a definite sell-to-gypsies sort of day.
The pregnancy has been going fine (at least once the sickness stopped). We had our 20 week scan last week, and all is looking well. We also found out that it is going to be a boy, so that has been giving me a reality check all week. I don’t just have a baby in there, I have a wee boy!
My daughter looked me in the eye pretty much immediately after birth. She was freaking out when the Doctors took her to weigh her and clean off the Mycomium, but she immediately calmed down when I took her and held her.
As a father, I was expecting a surge of love/adoration when I first held my newborn daughter. Instead, I mostly felt a ‘holy s**t, what have I done’ and the feeling of immense resonsibility.
That changed - my daughter is now three years old and I love her more than anything I’ve ever loved before.
That dynamic is actually the key piece of advice I’ve given expecting fathers - don’t be upset at yourself if you don’t feel an instant connection with your newborn. It’s something that has to be nurtured through spending time as familly, but as you start feeling it and the first time they say ‘daddy’, you are done. In a good way.
