Yeah, I noticed too, which is, I suspect, the reason why it wasn’t published anonymously.
I did have an overwhelming love at first sight with my baby, and my reasoning is that I am very, very susceptible to the powers of oxytocin. For the first couple months breastfeeding I would get flooded with an amazing feeling that I can only compare to a narcotic. No one else I’ve talked to has had such an intense experience. My brain chemicals are dank.
I would say to my friends who don’t have kids something like, “You know how you sometimes have a bowl of hot soup and read a whole magazine, lingering over it at the table? Enjoy that because it’s likely you’ll not get to do that for a long time once you have a baby.” So while I don’t regret having a baby I really sometimes miss the little things, like reading magazine articles. I suppose that’s normal, though sometimes I really want to shake my childless friends, especially when they sit and contemplate going to a bar after lunch.
And that’s the thing. Mammalian biology (under most circumstances) predisposes mothers to ‘fall in love’ with their offspring in the very early hours or days of life. It assures (in most cases) the survival of the offspring: when the mother couldn’t care less, the bear cub/elephant calf/human baby is extremely susceptible to carking it.
So when a mother (of whichever variety) doesn’t display the ‘normal’ behaviours expected, it indicates a pathology of some sort. It may be social or environmental, or it may be physical, as in the lack of the above-mentioned oxytocin coursing through her system.
There is certainly something amiss with the woman in this story.
Oh me me! Having a baby (which I’ve done four times) fills me with the most amazing euphoria, high as a kite, can’t compare to any other life experience. The euphoria persists until the baby is about a year old. It’s so great it’s almost worth summoning another human being into existence just to get the feeling again (almost). Oxytocin, it is goodness.
I think it is valuable for people like the article’s author to share their experience, so that people thinking “hmm I’m just not feeling like having babies” can know her experience can happen.
but like so many posters have said, share these feelings ANONYMOUSLY. What’s the point of doing mothering so conscientiously if joylessly just to say “I didn’t love you” publicly in a goddamn newspaper when they’re adults?
I can’t have children and wanted to very badly. My first reaction was… What an ungreatful wench! However, we’re all different and she’s just expressing her personal human emotion. Fair enough. The grass always looks greener on the other side as they say.
if this person exists (can’t always tell with the Daily Fail) she sounds like what I would sound like in a couple of decades if I got coerced or conned into having kids. since that’s not likely to happen I haven’t given it too much thought other than thinking “she ain’t the only one, and the Internet Indignation Squad is gearing up to broadcast their recreational outrage about how awful a person she is.”
The Internet Indignation Squad (RECRUITING NOW BTW!! :D) is for the most part upset that the subject of the OP shared her feelings about motherhood with the world. At the least it’s pretty damned tacky. At worst, it’s the metaphorical kick in the teeth she always wanted to deliver to her kids but wasn’t able to for reasons social and cultural. To me it sounded like payback time…“I was the very best mother in the world to you kids, but I loathed every minute of it and now you’re going to suffer the public indignity of my story”. That’s hateful. 
Sure, open up a dialogue about the realities of having kids. Shame those who push kids over every other human endeavour or experience. Make all birth-control (pharmaceutical and surgical) free and legal. Make abortions free and legal too. Let’s hope for a world in the future where EVERY parent welcomes the arrival of their child, not one where the cultural push is so strong that it envelopes everyone regardless of their desire to procreate.
But the woman in the OP is a different creature altogether, again, if the story is true as reported.
A mother bonding with her child is as much a biochemical as an emotional response. Sometimes those precursors are delayed or entirely missing or limited for various reasons. If this woman had been my patient (as a hypothetical Maternal Welfare Practitioner) I would have been sending her off for testing of physical well-being and/or psychiatric assessment.
Nobody is saying that parents can’t be ambivalent about parenthood…geez, I’d go out on a limb and say that every parent ever has at least on ONE occasion regretted their decision to have kids. Probably more like twenty, but who’s counting?? Me? Four kids, two grandkids, and I’d hand the KIDS back in a heartbeat…still giving me grief and they’re in their twenties/thirties now!! 
If the subject of the OP really loved her kids as she claims, she would have written her story as an academic treatise on the dangers of being forced to have kids when you don’t want them.
But she didn’t. And that’s why she’s being denigrated in this thread.
I think she’s using her kids as a scapegoat. The problem wasn’t her kids–hell, she liked her kids, according to her–the problem is that she really didn’t like the culturally defined role of being a mother, but also lacked the imagination to reshape that role into anything more palatable to her. She keeps talking about how they did all the “normal” things or “typical” things. She seems to feel like she had exactly two options: have kids and live the exact life “moms” do, or not have kids. She didn’t like the “typical” life, so it’s her kids’ fault.
This is not to say everyone needs to have kids, or that everyone will love kids if they just do it right. But she doesn’t seem to have even tried: she just bitterly accepted, right from the get-go, that the only way to be a “good mum” was to play a role she hated.
That’s weird, creepy, and has a nice dose of doublespeak to boot. If one of my friends said this, I would lose my trust in him and would stop being his friend.
I don’t want to come off as being really judgmental, but if the concept of “kids as taking machines” came as a complete surprise to her, she REALLY was not well-served by the people around her during the months preceding the birth of her first.
I must admit I only skimmed the article – does she mention anywhere having an epiphany that she was an all-take-no-give parasite to her own mother? Or conversely, a claim that she wasn’t?
I side with the “mental disorder” people.
The author wants to blame a lack of “maternal bond” for her failures as a parent, but it goes way beyond that. I don’t know any normal, adjusted person, male or female, parent or not, who wouldn’t be a blubbering idiot if they did something bone-headed like leave an infant outside a store. And here’s the key: It wouldn’t matter whether the child was their own or not. It wouldn’t matter whether they had “bonded” with the infant yet, or not. It’s basic human empathy – the same empathy that would propel hundreds of perfect strangers to search for that same infant had she turned up missing.
In short, the author lacks basic human empathy. And that goes beyond “maternal” feelings. I feel badly for her children.
I think a lot of Americans are reading too much into the abandon baby incident. For one thing it happened in England where people are less paranoid about infants being left alone. She was probably tired which definitely affects how strongly one emotionally reacts to something. The baby was in a fairly safe place. It’s not like she abandoned him in a floodplain in the middle of rainstorm or beside a busy highway.
Yes. There’s so much weirdness going now with having children these days. Total child worship. I look at Facebook and some of the things people say about their kids, and I just roll my eyes and make retching noises. For some reason, we’re all required to give up any semblance of ourselves in service to our children. I mean, really, I was reading magazine articles a week after I had my kids, and have continued to do so throughout their childhood. I can’t even imagine being so far into my children that I give up who I am in order to raise them.
I remember one time, after my father in law died, us grownups put the kids to bed and proceeded to drink and reminisce. My niece kept coming downstairs to bother my sister in law, and when I told niece that it was grown up time and to go back to bed, my sister in law looked at me in wonder and said “grown up time! That’s a great idea!” As if it never occurred to her that she did not need to have her daughter tell her what to do at all times of the day.
Everyone is different, and not everyone sees children as precious wonder with rainbows flying out of their ass. I love my kids, and would take a bullet for them, but I don’t worship them or think they are a “gift” in any way. I also enjoy them more as they’ve gotten older and can have a regular relationship with me. I don’t think they’ve suffered at all.
I think it’s really refreshing to hear a mother say this. I think you’re right that many, many people nowadays act like once you’re a mother that’s the only part of your identity that matters anymore and your free time must be entirely consumed by obsessing over your kid.
It’s enough that it has almost scared me into not wanting to have kids, but I would like to think that it’s possible to be a mother and still enjoy having hobbies, interests, and time for myself. I think in some cases, people just feel guilty about asking other people for help so they can get a break from the kid, the way that the mom in the original article acts like it was some triumph that she never had a nanny help her watch those kids.
If this story is real, I think it is very thoughtless and cruel of her to write it under her real name and include her children’s photos. Whatever your feelings on motherhood, your children did not ask for you and don’t deserve that kind of treatment.
This is a much more coherent version of what I was trying to say earlier, and I totally agree.
I do have to say I’m a little squicked out by all the people in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet) calling her out as a psychopath or a sociopath or a person on the autism spectrum - based entirely on a single article from the Daily Mail that was probably highly edited to make it more “newsworthy.”
Those afflictions are real and serious, and it doesn’t serve anyone well to trivialize them by throwing them around at everyone who doesn’t seem as “warm” or “emotional” as we think they should be from our armchair vantage point.
Now, if you want to call her out for being selfish and callous for doing this publicly with pictures of her kids and the whole nine yards - go for it!
Everyone except your employer. They think you can pop out a kid and saunter back into work the next week. Plus, working through your entire pregnancy is almost expected and you are made to feel guilty of you don’t. I am freaking tired and everything is thrice the effort, this working through my pregnancy thing is crap :mad:
Everyone has a different life experience, and I have to agree with you that her not being able to match up what she sees as appropriate emotions for motherhood with what she feels as something that is sad, but not necessarily unnatural.
This really hurt my feelings when I read it because it paints one “correct” vision of what women are supposed to be. Not all of us have as strong of a pull to be mothers or as strong emotional reactions in general. To paint all folks who don’t react exactly as you think they should as mentally ill is pretty awful, IMO. I realize that my opinion probably doesn’t matter to you, as I’m childless, but I felt the need to tell you that your reasoning is less than sound and more than a little ethnocentric.
Perhaps this is limited to the culture in your area, as becoming a blubbering idiot whenever something bone-headed happens is not only counterproductive, but it’s a waste of your emotional capabilities. The woman sounds like she comes from a town where she probably knows the shopkeeper and isn’t likely to have her baby abducted in the hour or so when all of this occurred, but with the way that folks are reacting, they make it sound like the baby is going to be sold on the black market the minute a mom takes her eyes off of it.
I think folks like PunditLisa are overreacting because there is so much in American culture that encourages women, especially mothers to be panic-stricken about somewhat minor occurrences. Yes, she left the kid at the store. The kid was three weeks old and still becoming part of the regular habits; the dog that she had a bit more panic about had been in the family for much longer.
Thank you for this. It’s nice to see that the POV of “parenthood can be adulthood with kids and not just child worship and no self development” in this thread. I feel like my mother-in-law is missing a lot from her life because she devoted herself entirely to raising her children with very little self development, and now that they’re adults, she is lonely and bored and doesn’t have a lot of hobbies or interests or friends.
It wasn’t just the leaving the baby at the store, though. It was that she missed the dog first. However, the worst part was when she wasn’t even phased by the fact that her son almost died at birth. That’s…creepy.
I don’t think there’s enough information in the article to tell. If she had been heavily medicated during the birth (or even just exhausted, if it was a long and/or difficult labor), I don’t think it’s THAT strange that her reaction in the moment was flat. Four hours later, the baby was fine (according to the article). The trauma was almost academic at that point. The strange part to me is that she seems to have made up her mind there and then that she didn’t have maternal feelings for her baby.
I think she’s an odd duck, but all the weirdness I’m getting from her telling of her story has a lot more to do with her own inflexibility of thinking, and less with her actual mothering.