As we went into labor I started to think about how I would react as I saw my son for the first time. I imagined something coming over me that I had never experienced. Labor was short and we were rushed into the room, 10 minutes later I was holding him. With all the excitement I was not aware of anything but the process but while I was holding him I kept waiting for that magical feeling to come over me. It just wasn’t happening. I was having huge feelings of love for my wife but not really feeling anything for my new son. I was ashamed and thinking I wasn’t normal. I was doing a good job of faking it and just sort of forgot about that magic feeling, all I wanted at this point was not to feel so ashamed of myself. For some reason they wanted to put him in an incubator for a while. About 3 hours after his birth I was watching him in the incubator and out of nowhere it hit me! A feeling I have never experienced before or since. Nothing to compare it to. I broke down and cried for a minute or two and from that moment on the bond has never wavered.
That’s wonderful. Yeah, it doesn’t always hit right away. I knew ahead of time that it was common for bonding to take time and that not everyone feels instant joy when they have a baby, so I didn’t freak out too much. I had a very rough time postpartum including days of just pure hell immediately following my son’s birth, I’m still shaken up about it three years later. For me it took about six months before I started to feel anything for my son. I was just going through the motions with PPD which didn’t help. But by the time he was eight months old, yow, I was hooked. It’s hard to describe, but there’s like a second sun in my universe now, and he walks around my house every day.
There’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. When a baby is first born, it doesn’t do anything. You give and give and give and get nothing back in return. You don’t have a clear sense of your child’s identity. There are a lot of reasons parents may not connect right away. But when they start to develop a personality, everything changes.
With my stepdaughter it took about 3 years before I really felt the same kind of bond. This would have been a couple of years before my son was born. She was 4 when I got her
For the Elder Ottlet and me it took about an hour and a half: until that point my concern and attention were on her mother since she was older than average. When she was released from post-delivery and taken to her room (EO had voided her mecomium in the meantime, which was a whole 'nother experience), they gave EO to me while they were getting mom settled; I leaned back with her on my chest, whereupon she curled up in a tiny ball, gave a sigh bigger than her whole body, and fell asleep. I was a goner, and I still get a tad misty eyed thinking about it over 36 years later.
This was my experience with my second baby. The birth was quick, and we’d found out right afterwards that no one could come visit because there was an RSV outbreak. This meant that our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who we’d assured could come see me and the baby, couldn’t do that, so I decided to go home the next day, despite my exhaustion. I was thinking about that and fretting because I wasn’t feeling all that close to this second baby when I looked over at her hospital bassinet and saw she was gazing at me. At that moment, I fell in love with her, and I’ve been able to say honestly that I love them both equally ever since.