The subject of post-natal depression has been flying around a fair bit of late both in the media and in civilian life. I was talking to a woman just now, in fact, who was explaining how after the recent birth of her second son, it took her a full seven weeks to fall in love with him. Up till that point, she’d felt he was a stranger she had to get to know, so that when friends asked what he was like over the phone, she’d reply, ‘I don’t actually know yet.’ Then all of a sudden, with no apparent trigger she could recall, her maternal floodgates mysteriously opened and she fell head over heels with him. This pace of bonding was in marked contrast to the first time round, when she’d fallen in love at first sight and was therefore dismayed, guilty and depressed about it until she spoke to friends who reassured her by confiding they’d experienced similar. She had in fact, wanted a girl, so badly, she simply hadn’t designated a place on her cosmological map for a second son and literally ‘didn’t know what to do with him’ at first - it just took her a while to adjust that. This resonated with me because my own mum had really wanted a girl too, she told me once and I turned out alright and in one piece regardless. Maybe it’s that which inspired me to write this by way of reassurance for any mothers out there who may be beating themselves up unnecessarily over this. Treating post-partum women over the years, I found the ratio between love-at-first-sight and slowly-getting-to-know-you bonding modes to be around 50:50. Women experiencing the latter mode, would feel confused and inadequate because they weren’t living up to an internalised ideal. They’d feel isolated and alone because they were too ashamed to admit their feelings for fear of social opprobrium. While this combination may have presented itself to the naked eye as post-natal depression caused by post-partum hormonal flux, it was quite evident during treatment, that as soon as the matter was aired and the mother accepted the slow bonding mode was as natural as the instant variety and forgave herself, the so-called depression would instantaneously lift without any need to meddle with hormonal functions. But it’s not just mothers who experience this of course. Fathers do too. And speaking as a father of three grown men myself, I must confess to having found the falling in love process increasingly slower with each child. I fell helplessly in love with my first son even as his fontanels were opening to help his head squeeze through the birth canal. Then with my second son, even though I delivered him myself, it took me about three weeks to settle into the relationship, mostly because I felt a bit treacherous taking any attention away from my first son. When my third son came along, in spite of spending the first hour of his life giving him a cranio-sacral therapy session to lengthen out his spine after his troublesome journey and giving him the father-to-son verbal rundown on life on earth, it took me a full 90 days of feeling nothing but confusion, having really wanted a daughter, before one day he smiled at me and I melted in a pool of undying paternal devotion. And now at the ages of 24, 22 and 16, I’m still falling progressively more in parental love with all three equally, as each day passes. The point I’m making: there is no norm, no ideal way to feel when you have a baby. Whatever you feel, whether it’s love at first sight or nothing but bemusement, is entirely natural. As a parent, you are not meant to feel anything in particular. All you’re meant to do is be yourself and do your best to look after, protect, clean, feed and wind the little person in your charge, in as kind, respectful, patient, wise, generous and loving way as you can manage from moment to moment. Fundamentally, if you accept yourself as you are, they accept themselves too – babies learn by example – and there’s nothing quite so important for personal development both for your child and you, as self-acceptance. In this space of mutual self-acceptance wherein we are what we are and feel what we feel, love will grow in its own way, in its own time and in its own many splendid fashion.
