To hope my baby will grow on me?

[Babyblues99]

Having a hard time right now. My baby son is 2 weeks old and i think i'm having some attachment issues.

We were separated on day one as he had to go into the NICU and i could only visit and not really hold him at all. After several further days in the hospital we were released and have now been at home for a few days. I love him and think he is really cute but it is in a rather detached way and i cannot help but feel super guilty and worried about our relationship. I don't think it is PND i feel fine and positive just really concerned about doing right by my son. I was planning to spend a year off with him but now don't know how i will cope emotionally. I feel like all my energy is going into catering to his physical needs and i don't have time to enjoy him. This is made worse by my other half who is being a model loving father, cuddles the little man all the time leaps to change nappies etc etc this is hard to see when i feel its do difficult for me to enjoy this.

My mother always said to me that she was never very maternal and didnt really like us until we could interact and now we are close but she was never emotionally available growing up so i am terrified that i will inflict this on him and the cycle will continue.

I am also aware that this may simply be me worrying about something that may never happen and this is stopping me from simply enjoying my son and creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

I am hoping this is just a blip because of the separation and hospital stay.

I would really appreciate some stories about your own early relationships with your children and if you had any early issues. i do know that the immediate bond is sometimes missing and needs to grow over time so i hope this will be the case with me but i do wonder if i'm simply a bit broken from my own history and need to let that go and just enjoy the experience.

The first few weeks are SO hard. Just be kind to yourself. None of it is easy. But it does get easier (ifykwim!)

Those first few weeks are just a whirlwind of emotions, hormones, and worry. But once you get into a bit more of a routine, recover from the birth, and have a bit more one to one time, it will help.

Congratulations on your new little one.

Sorry about your rocky start. I had similar both DS and I very ill and didn’t see him for a week. At the beginning I felt I was just going through the motions. Then one night I fell asleep on the bed with ds. I woke up and it was like a switch I felt the love I was expecting from day one. My DS was 6 months old. I think when baby has been ill at the start your can go into self preservation mode that stops you bonding as easily in some primeaval just in case mode. Give yourself time it will hapoen

Hi there and I am sorry that you had such a stressful experience. I remember telling a friend before she gave birth not to worry if she didn't 'fall in love' with her baby. I didn't and felt more like a lioness(!) in the sense of I would protect my baby with my life and do anything to keep it alive etc. but didn't 'love' it if that makes sense. I had PND after one birth but not all... but I did feel the same each time.

The friend rang me a few weeks after giving birth and told me that she was incredibly relieved that I had told her this as she felt similarly and would have thought it was 'wrong' otherwise.

Honestly, it is such an incredibly hard time a couple of weeks in, that you just need to take care of yourself and your baby and don't worry about 'love'. In my experience 'love' comes later when you begin to know them... this can take months not days!

For the first few weeks I lived in hope that someone would say it was all a horrible mistake and the baby wasn't mine.
It took until 8 weeks for that to change

Don't worry OP I felt exactly the same and my husband made me feel terribly guilty (not intentionally) because he was so obsessed with the baby and so emotionally attached to her whereas I felt quite resentful and as though I was just going through the motions. It got worse before it got better and like you my mother was emotionally unavailable and this caused me to worry more about our bond. Day by day it grew and now we have a very close bond. It all got so much easier at about 3 months.

Thanks all. Poddage, that is a really good description, it feels like i am enduring someone else's child for a short while and my disappointment comes when i realize that this may be it.

I'm too ashamed to tell my husband completely about my fears as he is so naturally good with our son that i feel that perhaps it is because i'm just not trying hard enough or over analyzing. in the hospital i did break down and said to him i was concerned about the separation and stress of our stay effecting my mental health but i haven't said it is still effecting me now, i think i am hoping this will become true.

I felt a bit the same when DD was born, OP - and I didn't have the issues with NICU that you had. I think it's a lot more common than people admit to, plus the media tells us to expect the instant rush of tiger love. And it's just not like that for everyone

AND they don't do much at 2 weeks! By 2 months he'll be more interactive.

In my case, DD was about 6-7 weeks old and starting to hold eye contact and smile, when I was pushing her to the supermarket. A massive black dog came rushing over to the pram, barking madly, and in the few seconds it took for the owner to call it/me to realise it was being friendly, I'd stepped straight in front of the pram so it would get me first without even thinking about it. And I'm a massive wimp!!

That's when I realised how much I did love her, and how worried I'd been, and I cried for most of the walk

Now she's 2.5 and she's my world. But honestly, it takes time to develop. After all, you didn't love your partner on first sight, right? Any relationship needs to grow. Enjoy the cuddles, give your body and mind time to heal and adjust, and keep a background eye on how you are feeling generally happy over the next few weeks, just in case you do need to speak to the GP re PND.

Same here - with my second I didn't even had the urge to look after him, I just wanted to have a 'break' as was in quite a lot of pain and happily delegated the cuddles to my parents and dh whenever I could for the first few days. Obviously I did look after him out of a sense of duty more than out of love - I felt very removed.

I just cracked on with it and slowly but surely the love snuck up on me and now I love him and my eldest to distraction. I wouldn't worry about it until you're much further down the line, unless you start not to want to care for him, or you start to feel like actually you don't love him (it doesn't sound that this is going to be a problem for you based on what you've said!)

If you have issue telling your DH and we’re worried about your MH at some point, then I wouod definitively go and see the GP about PND.

I know that you think you are absolutely fine and don’t have it. But then I didn’t think so either. And all the stories about people who didn’t bond with their baby straight away confirmed to me that yes I was just normal and my struggles were normal.

So please get yourself checked. If it’s not PND then great. But if it is, support for the ONS would help yu a lot dealing with it all.
And if it’s not PND, what SGB said is the best advice ever. Act like if you loved your child to the moon and back. Act of the bond between you is indestructible. And it will become a reality.