Love at First Sight -- Sometimes

If you happen to fall into the "Whoa, who the heck is this?" camp or feel guilty because your first postpartum thought was, "Oh, God, please let me sleep," bear in mind that most of what we know about the neurochemistry of mother love comes from animal research. For obvious reasons, researchers can't manipulate the hormone levels in human mothers' brains, so they do most of their research on rodents. Klaus and Kennell based much of their research on goats and sheep. Apparently, if ewes don't bond immediately with their babies, and the latter wander out into the pasture and get mixed up with all the other little lambies, the ewes don't know who is who (or whose ewe is who -- or ewe . . .). Needless to say, you're not a sheep, and feeling somewhat detached, even put off by your baby, is in no way maladaptive during the first few weeks postpartum.

Chances are, you will look at your baby and experience a ferocious love -- feeling more like a lion than a lamb. When you hold your newborn against your bare skin, cradle her between hand and heart, stroke and pat her, you're likely to feel a pull, an intimacy, an intense longing for more. I remember how bereft I felt when the maternity-ward nurse would come to take Maddie back to the newborn nursery so I could rest after feeding her. One morning I padded down the hospital hall to have a peek and found Maddie crying in protest during a highly efficient but unnecessarily abrupt diaper change. I wanted to hurl my body through the glass, to save her from Nurse Cruella's icy wipes.

Katherine, whose baby was born by cesarean section in the United Kingdom, described an "instantaneous, absolute, wonderful connection" with her baby. In fact, she was furious when she heard her husband refer to their daughter as "it" when he telephoned family and friends with the big news. "I remember how outraged I was -- I mean, crying hysterically -- when David said, 'Oh, it's fine,' and I just felt as though he was denying her being an individual. I was really upset."

The fact that childbirth brings about more dramatic physical changes than any experience other than death speaks volumes in describing how fully saturated and drained one feels immediately postpartum.¹⁹ As with every other moment in our emotional experience as mothers, there is not a "right" way to react. As anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes, other animals have very specific ways of acting immediately following the birth of their young, but "there are no 'fixed action patterns' universally exhibited by new mothers in Homo sapiens comparable to mammalian mothers licking babies and biting off the amniotic sac." Yummy! No, we don't tend to lick our babies or eat our placentas or engage in any particular "species-specific" way. Euphoria is neither the only nor the "typical" reaction to a baby's arrival. ²⁰

Whether or not you fall head over heels in love with your baby in the delivery room says absolutely nothing about your relative "goodness" as a mother. But your reaction to childbirth and to the intense emotions you experience provides important clues to your strengths and weaknesses, hot buttons and hidden talents. It pays to note how this first and most dramatic challenge of motherhood made you feel, because there will be myriad times in the years ahead when you will once again experience exhaustion, fear, euphoria, and the feeling of being out of control. Recognizing that you tend to shut down emotionally when you're anxious or that losing control makes you see red or that exhaustion goes hand in hand with panic gives you a chance to work on those weak spots as your child grows.

Notes
19. Susan H. Greenberg and Karen Springen, “The Baby Blues and Beyond,” Newsweek, July 2, 2001, p. 26.
20. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine, 1999), p. 167.