- During my first pregnancy, I couldn't wait to meet my baby and give him all the snuggles.
- When he was handed over to me covered in poop, I lied and said I loved him.
I spent my first pregnancy dreaming about the magical moment I would finally gaze into my son's face and shower him with unbridled affection and bare-skinned snuggles. I couldn't wait to feel that storied burst of pure love.
The actual moment I first saw my son, I was flat on my back, cringing as my fourth-degree tear was stitched. I was exhausted and clutching an emesis bag like a life raft.
The well-meaning nurse held brand-new baby Jack over me, aggressively wiping his red, angry cheek, saying, "Uh oh, there's poop on his face."
Disgusting. Not magical. There's zero meconium in the movies.
I wanted to scream, "Clean him up first!" Instead, I managed, "Mommy loves you!"
My first words as a mother were a bald-faced lie.
I was filled with guilt
A quick Google search for "I don't love my newborn" — yikes, what a sentence — yields evidence that much ink has been spilled on the topic. How do I know? Because, hi, it's me, the Googler with the question I couldn't ask out loud. I even used incognito mode, lest the algorithm blow my cover as an apparent sociopath parent.
Every article reassured me I wasn't alone in my feelings but didn't deliver enough insight to absolve my guilt or explain the phenomenon. They discussed baby blues and roadblocks to affection like colic and sleeplessness. Baby Jack was gifting me six- to eight-hour stretches nightly, and his wake time was serene. I was taking meticulously researched care of him. He was thriving, and I was surrounded by endless support.
So why did I feel so cold?
I tamped it down. I didn't not love my baby, but I knew it was that primal love of protection, not the Instagram-gushing kind.
I fell in love with my children
The love did happen, but not in a singular moment. There was no one smile exchanged over a diaper change that served as the catalyst of heart emojis exploding out of my mama soul. But at some point I began to adore baby Jack and knew no greater love.
The night before I welcomed my second child, I reflected on the dull exhaustion of maintaining a leaky, flimsy newborn void of heart-fluttering bursts of affection. I told myself: "Jack's delivery was traumatic. You'll love her the second you see her."
Nope.
When I held baby Alice, I admired her swollen lips, blond tufts of hair, and tiny fingernails. But the world didn't melt away. I was just a woman in a hospital bed, overwhelmed.
But experience had taught me that love would come, so I whispered, "I don't know you yet, but I promise to love you."
My big epiphany came during a midnight nursing session watching "Frasier," a '90s sitcom centered on a smooth-voiced radio host. His response to his producer's sharing that she's pregnant had me sobbing on my couch, clutching baby Alice.
"Roz, I'm going to tell you something I didn't find out until I became a father," he said. "You don't just love your children. You fall in love with them. It's that same rush, that same overwhelming desire to see them, to hold them, and bore other people to tears with every detail about them."
There it was. Evidently I'd needed a fussy, fictional middle-aged man to hand me a piece of wisdom no mother had revealed. Of course you love your children in that protective way. But as with any love of a lifetime, you fall in love with your baby. Every feeding, diaper change, giggle, thigh roll, happy shriek, and step is a building block in your relationship. Each moment reveals a small part of their personality you get to know and adore.
It's unrealistic to tell every new mother she'll experience love at first sight. We give love time in our romances, and we should give it time with our children, too.
Two years after my "Frasier" moment of truth, my third little love was born. I saw her in the operating room, surprised by the tufts of red hair, and was thrilled to whisper to baby Charlotte: "Hello, sweet girl. I can't wait to fall in love with you."