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When my first daughter was born I had trouble bonding. The whole first six weeks just felt surreal and the drugs I had to take for the pain from the csection didn’t do anything to lessen the out of body experience.Between the time she was 6 weeks old to the time that I became pregnant with baby #2, things were OK between her and me. Although I don’t exactly feel proud about what “OK” has been, I dispensed my affection effortlessly.

But during my pregnancy with #2 things started to go downhill. I was no longer able to carry her or bend over and give her a kiss goodnight. I did less with her and mentally prepared myself for having to share my time and efforts with two kids. Somewhere along the line I took my eyes off the ball and this avalanched into completely feeling detached from her again. After my second daughter was born I took an even smaller role in her care. My husband and I sort of fell into this routine where my main priority was the baby while his was our older daughter. As the weeks passed I felt even more detached from her still.
The baby is 5 months old now and being affectionate with her has been effortless. But this isn’t the case with my oldest. I have turned out to be a very detached kind of mother. I dispense my affection sparingly and I’m filled with guilt for it. The guilt, however, had not sparked any change …until recently.

I have often stopped and thought about this and wondered why I have ended up being this kind of parent to her and I have come to two possible reasons for it. 1) She looks too much like me for my own comfort, or 2) I’m carrying over parenting disfunctions from my father.

Examining Possibility #1
She looks like me , she’s hairy like me, her legs are shaped like mine, she tans like I do, her teeth look like she might need braces like I did, her hair is curly frizzy mess like mine. She’s a mini-me. Perhaps this reminds me of the things I don’t like about myself. In fact, my very first thought when I finally got a good look at her the day she was born was “Oh my god, she looks too much like me”. I didn’t like it. I wanted to send her back even. I didn’t want her. I couldn’t even bring myself to hold her right. I instead held her out at arms length. A big part of it was ppd, c/s, drugs, you name it. I did feel an enormous amount of guilt for this and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. I thought I should have immediately fallen in love with my baby, but I just couldn’t do it. What was wrong with me, I asked? Weeks later when the cloud lifted, I knew it had been ppd. I had survived it and I thought those feelings of rejection of my own child were gone forever. But that wasn’t the case.

My second pregnancy rekindled those feelings. It’s taking me a little effort to get over it again but I have to ask myself. If now, 3 years later, I’m still having problems with it then it must be something more deeply rooted and I can’t look the other way… I’ve asked myself this before… do I hate myself through her? and Why?

Examining Possibility #2
Back to how we learn how to parent, I grew up with an unaffectionate father and an absent mother (because she was died when I was 3). So I never got all that motherly affection I know I would have gotten had she not died. I’m convinced he is a victim of sexual abuse as a child so he wasn’t very well equiped to make up for my missing mother either so … I got deal a bad hand of cards I guess.

I never learned how to be affectionate. .. well, I know HOW I just don’t usually feel that urge or need necessarily. In fact, I feel repelled by affection quite a lot. I was like this all through my childhood and I have softened up a bit with my husband and my kids but it’s still not as easy as I’d like. Dispensing and receiving affection still takes a bit of effort. I need to fight that flee reflex a lot.

Why am I thinking about all this now?
I became angry at her tonight because she wouldn’t listen to me when i said “go wash your hands”. I ended up getting SO mad that I grabbed my flip-flop and swatted her on the butt. A few minutes later I asked her to “go pee”. It was bedtime and she just stood there again not doing what I had asked. I yelled. She cried. And it tore me apart from the inside. It’s not so much that she cried, but the way she cried. I just KNOW what she was feeling at that precise moment because I felt it too. I’ve felt it a few times growing up and in adulthood and I felt it again just then. It’s a very terrible and hopeless feeling. It’s the kind of feeling you have when the closest person to you has declared that they no longer love or want you. I may as well have kicked her out of the house and locked my front door behind her. It hurt me and it hurts now to write it.

I later apologized to her. She doubt she undersood much of what I said but just before she went to bed I took her face in my hands and said “I’m sorry i made you feel that way. You don’t deserve it”. She was all smiles of course because she thought I was just being silly. Having apologized may have made me feel better, but I dont’ know that it did much for her. she had ‘forogotten’ the incident by then and was her silly self again, but I have to realize that those little dents have a comulitive effect.

I wonder if I will have these issues with younger daughter. She looks nothing like me. She’s all daddy. Will I develop the same set of problems? Or will I show favoritism and completely screw up my first daughter’s life.

Being a parent is a hard job. I might be overanalyzing things a bit here but I guess it’s my job to question myself. There’s a lot at stake here.