It Can Be Hard to Love Your Newborn Baby
By: Amy Colleen
Tags: Relationships, Mental Health, Parenting, Baby, Love

My newborn baby was cuter than most.

I know what you’re thinking. Every parent is biased toward their own kid, right? But no, I’m really serious — my baby was objectively cute right from day one. The nurses in the postpartum ward told me so! Admittedly, I’d just been through a traumatic experience and wasn’t allowed any visitors, so maybe they were just being nice.

But I’m choosing to believe my baby was unusually cute.

He didn’t, as my best friend put it, look like a mushroom or a wrinkly baked potato. His skin was gently fuzzy and soft. His wide blue eyes stared up at me unblinking, puzzled, as I grappled with breastfeeding and cried from pain and frustration. His hair was thick and abundant, gleaming with hints of red among light brown.

He was a beautiful baby. Everybody said so.

But in those first few weeks, I looked at my objectively cute baby and all I could do was cry.

I wanted to love him. How could anyone not love that face?

I kept telling myself I was lucky. We had a scare in those early days when his genetic screening showed a high risk for cystic fibrosis. But his tests came back negative, and he was healthy. My husband took the maximum leave from his job, and we were together. We had a roof over our head and food on the table and after a few tense, tearful days, I was finally able to breastfeed. We had it better and easier than many.

But over and over, every night, feeling battered and broken up and delirious from sleep deprivation, I would look down at my ferociously nursing infant and feel numb inside.

“Here’s a pamphlet on danger signs to look out for,” the hospital told me at discharge. “If you feel murderous or suicidal, get some help. If you start bleeding to death or have a fever so high your brain begins to melt, give us a call.”

Cool. Thanks.

I’ve teetered anxiously on the edge of depression for years. I’d never been diagnosed, but I knew how to look for the warning signs. If you want to hurt your baby, you have a problem. If you don’t want to be around your baby, you have a problem.

I didn’t feel either of those things. All I wanted was to keep him safe and warm and protected. I cared and worried so hard I would wake myself up from a few moments of desperately needed sleep, hallucinating all kinds of peril and distress. When I closed my eyes I saw him in danger, and all I wanted was to make sure he was okay.

And that was, in fact, all I wanted.

I looked into his staring eyes and grasped at his tiny perfect hands and wished I felt the adoration I could see on my husband’s face. I convinced myself it must be there. I didn’t feel animosity toward my baby, so therefore I must feel affection. I didn’t have thoughts of hatred or self-harm, so everything must be okay. I wanted above all else to keep him safe, but I wasn’t sure I truly loved him.

Love felt as faraway and unreal as a full night of sleep. Yet I knew if my baby could see me and smell me and hear me and know me, I couldn’t risk letting his barely-developed brain feel my lack of warmth.

So I made it into a mantra. “Mommy loves you,” I told him over and over again. “Mommy loves you, baby. I love you so much. I love you, I love you.”

It didn’t feel true. But I kept saying it. I made up songs and sang them as reassuringly as I could while he screamed through diaper changes. I walked between our two bedrooms endlessly, patting and shushing. I stroked his little back and kissed his plump cheeks and told him I was there. I did everything I could think of. Sometimes, he’d look at me. Sometimes, he’d fall asleep. More often, he’d cry.

I googled signs and symptoms obsessively. Most of the time it was relevant to the situation. But a few times my husband caught me reading about worst-case scenarios and sobbing over remote possibilities of problems we hadn’t even faced. “You’re spiraling,” he told me. “You can’t keep looking things up just in case they could happen. The baby is healthy. He’s thriving. Look at him! He’s fine.”

He was. So was I. That’s what I told everyone, anyway. What else can you say?

“He’s so cute! How’s everything going?”

“Oh, you know. I haven’t gotten more than two hours’ sleep at a time since I went into the hospital. I’m constantly in pain. COVID is keeping us from seeing our families. He cries a lot, and we think he might be colicky. I’m questioning whether I’m actually a good parent. You know, the usual.”

You can’t say any of that. You can make a lighthearted joke about the lack of sleep, and wryly comment on the fussiness or the dirty diapers or the constant laundry, but you can’t say, “I don’t think I love my baby the way everyone assumes I do.”

A newborn can be hard to love.

But they don’t tell you that.

There’s an abundance of poetry and prose and beatific gushing about the magic of new parenthood. There’s plenty of rhetoric about the instant bond you feel, the connecting link that binds you to your child and fills your heart with affection. I know it’s there, and I know it’s real. I saw it on my husband’s face. (I felt it for him, in fact, when I watched him step so naturally into his dad role.)

But they don’t tell you that you might not feel it for your baby right away.

A newborn is needy and demanding, and relentless. A newborn is cute sometimes, but most of the time a newborn just eats and sleeps and defecates. Sometimes he resists your cuddles. Sometimes he shrieks for no apparent reason.

I knew all this, theoretically, but I assumed that along with all these things, I would also feel an unquenchable and constant affection. I imagined gazing into my baby’s eyes and losing myself in blissful, unconditional love. I had wanted this baby, prayed for this baby, anticipated this baby through every tough moment of a very hard year.

And in reflecting on this very hard year, I came to grips with the fact that love can be unlovely.

(It turns out you have a lot of time for reflection when you’re up nursing a baby every two hours all night long.)

I know love is an action verb, and not necessarily a feeling or emotion. Love is an act of endless forgiveness. Love is not self-seeking. Love gives grace and looks for nothing in return.

And I am not nearly as good at it as I would like to be.

Despite his normal, human flaws, my husband is easy to love. It’s simple — he loves me back. I feel secure in his affection and know that my feelings for him are reciprocated. I take his love for granted far too often, in fact. My friends, likewise, are also easy to love. They return my acts of service and words of affirmation and give generously of their quality time (or at least, they did before COVID).

My newborn could give nothing back, and my task of loving him was deeper and harder and took more out of me than any relationship I’ve ever had before.

But I am his mother. My job is to love him, no matter how hard. No matter whether I feel warm fuzzies for him or not.

So I spoke words of love to him. I gave him my time (all of it!) and served him by changing his diaper and gave him sustenance and covered him with physical affection. I snuggled him close, and closer.

And then, one day, he smiled back at me.

Reader, I melted into a puddle.

It was like the moment when I felt his first kicks, all over again. Like the moment I saw the outline of his face on the blurry black-and-white sonogram. Like the moment the midwife laid him, kicking and blinking and gulping for air, on my chest for the first time and I burst into sobs of relief after 25 hours of misery.

It was an opening into the light.

I obsessively googled “baby smiles in the first month.” Turns out, a 4-week-old’s grin is probably due to gas, and not social recognition. But I didn’t care. It was a turning point.

Now he is older. Chubbier. Cuter. He coos, and laughs, and grins every time he sees me. He still cries, and he still makes a multitude of dirty diapers, and he still wakes me up at all hours of the night. But his personality is beginning to shine through as he holds his head up and gazes at his father and me. When he ducks his head and splits his whole face in a toothless beaming smile, I can see love shining in his wide-awake blue eyes. I can see it reflecting back what he’s getting from me.

Babies mirror what they see their parents do. They squirm with joy when they see their parents mirroring them. How much of the natural, easy-flowing love I feel for my baby today is because of him and his sweet smiles and laughs and cuddles, and how much is the result of my hard work in those perilous first weeks?

I don’t know, but I don’t think it really matters.

There will be times in the future when my son is hard to love. He will, like any other child, go through the terrible twos and the tyrannical threes, the difficult adolescent years and moments of sullen teenage discontent. He will be a pain in the neck and a thorn in my side sometimes. But I will still love him, and I will still tell him so, and I will still show up and put in the effort and say the words he needs to hear.

Because I am his mom, and it is my job and my responsibility and my incredible privilege to love him.

It is easier to love him today — squealing, cooing, bundle of plump precious softness that he is — than when he was a week old. The love I feel today is gently reassuring, comfortable, secure. It almost makes me feel as if I loved him all along, deep down, and just had a hard time realizing it. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe it really did take work and sacrifice and a lot of repetition of murmured affirmations.

Regardless, the love I feel for my baby fills me with hope. Hope that I will keep getting better at this. Hope that the God who loved me first, who still loves me when I am very hard to love, whose grace keeps giving even when I am incapable of giving back, will keep me going when life is hard to bear. Hope that my son will feel His love through me.

Love is hard and hopeful. And worth it.