‘It’s okay not to love your newborn’

“Not love her? What are you talking about?!” I thought, when a friend, a new parent herself, gently offered me this advice a few weeks before I became a mom. “Of course I’m going to love her! I already love her, I wouldn’t have lugged her around these nine months if I didn’t!”

I kept my surprise and if I’m honest, condescension, to myself, but then a few weeks later, in a painfully bright hospital ward, the words revisited me and I felt relief wash over me.

You expect this utter adoration to just burst forth when your child, well, bursts forth. That’s what is meant to happen. You completely forget the 20 hours of labour and all the organ reorganising you did for nine months and just become enraptured with this little human. Right?

But the first time my child was placed in my arms, it wasn’t an aura of love I felt, it was a wave of overwhelm. Who was this tiny person? What did they want?

I had heard so many moms say that they would do anything for their children, they’d throw themselves and their partners in front of a moving bus for them. Yet in those early days, I couldn’t help but think that I quite liked my partner, we had put years of work and love and nurturing into our relationship, I wasn’t prepared to make that sacrifice for this tiny squidge.

It’s a strange thing to discover that, despite carrying them for nine months, you don’t actually know them. They are so physically connected to you that your heartbeat calms them, your body produces everything they need for the first six months of life, your temperature rises and falls with theirs to ensure they are at the perfect 37.6 degrees Celsius. And yet, you have absolutely no idea who they will be or how you are going to occupy your days together.

In the midst of a sleepless night, I likened it to having a puppy – cute, but also incredibly frustrating and, frankly, more than a little annoying.

I don’t really know why this was so unexpected. Of course you have to get to know your child in order to develop a bond with them. Perhaps for some lucky first-time mothers, the connection is instantaneous, but for most, it takes time to build that relationship, as it does with any human.

Eighteen months in, I can confirm that I would absolutely throw everyone I love under a bus for her. She’s wild and precocious and dramatic and funny and sweet and loving and yes, she’s much harder to manage as a rampaging toddler than when she was as an immobile baby but she is also so much… more. Just more everything; more real, more present, more whole. She is magnificent.

If you’re waiting for the anxiety bubble to pop and all-encompassing love to arrive, just know it will come. Give it time. It starts the first time your touch quietens them, when their head turns at the sound of your voice, the first grin, the first “mama”. It might not be an explosion but trust that it will grow until one day you’ll realise that it’s all there. The adoration, the completeness, the pride, the devotion, and the love – oh my goodness the love.

One of Jane Austen’s characters once said that he could not “fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words” when he fell in love. “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” He may have been speaking of romantic love, but it’s never more true than a mother falling for her new child and her new self.

Feature image by Tim Bish on Unsplash