Last year my husband Dan and I went to a dinner party, where a couple told us they fell in love at first sight. Theirs was a brilliant story – short, rare, romantic. So when they asked, “How did you guys fall in love?” we looked at each other and laughed. Because Dan and I didn’t so much fall in love, as tentatively stumble into it. We took a couple of months to get to know each other, and a couple more to commit to a relationship. Gradually, our relationship grew into something tender and real. Even so, I never imagined I would fall in love slowly in this way with a baby. The love for your child would be instant, I assumed, like the flick of a switch inside you as soon as their cheek touched your chest. It was the only circumstance in which ‘love at first sight’ seemed a realistic concept.
Here is the place to say: I did not fall in love with my daughter Joni straight away. I did feel a wild surge of tenderness for her in the seconds after she was born: this tiny, slimy human, climbing up my chest. I whispered, “it’s okay, you’re safe now,” and I knew then that she had reassembled certain pieces of me. That I would always try to take care of her. But this was a feeling that seemed to come from my body, not my mind; one so powerful I did not need to choose it — it simply was. I had the sense it would have happened with or without much effort on my part. And love, I have learnt, is the opposite: a choice, an intention.
At the time I put this lack of love at first sight down to drugs and hormones. In the first hour after Joni’s birth, all I could think about was how many minutes we had before the doctors asked Dan to leave, and how terrified I would be once he did. (Coronavirus restrictions meant he was not allowed to stay in hospital with me after the birth.) Instead of looking at my baby, I watched the door, twitchy with fear. I was also so high on the drugs they had given me during a complicated labour that I was convinced I’d broken my neck. When Dan said, “I think you should get some sleep,” I said, “I can’t, because every time I close my eyes I see red, I hear them scraping my insides.” I knew these words sounded wild out loud, but on the inside I felt wilder. I‘d been told the force of love for my new baby would be strong enough to distract me from the physical and emotional toll of birth. So why did I still feel like a dog that had been hit by a car — so confused, so vulnerable, so scared?
By the time we arrived back home, although I was calmer, more myself, I still didn’t feel as ‘in love’ with my baby as I’d expected to. The day after the birth, Dan asked, “Don’t you love her more than anything in the world?” And I said, “No.” I think I shocked him, maybe worried him. In his eyes I saw how much he already loved Joni – so easily, so tenderly – and longed to feel the same. And yet, for those first seventy-two hours, I looked at my daughter with more fear than love, as we stayed up all night holding one finger under her nose, pressing two fingers lightly beneath her sleepsuit and on to her warm chest, to check she was still breathing.
At this point, if I hadn’t had honest conversations with women about motherhood, I might have believed there was something wrong with me. But after spending the last four years interviewing people about relationships, I knew there was no fixed template for love. For author Diana Evans, the love for her baby was: “immediate, unconditional, and as visceral as a physical thing.” Whereas for another author, Mira Jacob, motherhood definitely felt like “falling in love.” She told me, “Sometimes I wish I could do it over knowing that I would come to feel things for him, because I think I spent the first seven or eight months warily thinking, I love him, but am I feeling enough?” Two weeks after the birth, I thought about her words when Dan went back to work and I was alone with Joni for 12 hours each day. They were a kind arm around my shoulder, reminding me that my love for my baby was not going to be measured or judged. That it could unfurl slowly, and be no less meaningful. Perhaps even the opposite.
Gradually, I started to see flickers of who Joni might be: the way she stretched her arms in the air like Superman after she’d breastfed, or how she kicked out her legs to splash the bathwater; half excited, half nervous. Each day, I used my body to tend to her body – washing her, changing her, feeding her. In these small acts, which sometimes felt colossal, I made a daily choice to love her, even when it was hard or when I was scared. It wasn’t long after that – a week, maybe two – before I looked down at her tiny eyelashes while she was asleep, like fine bristles on a paintbrush, and knew for certain that I loved her. Still, even then, when I thought I had fallen in love completely, I hadn’t. Because love isn’t a course you complete; it’s a project you keep contributing to. Knowing this, it shouldn’t have surprised me that my love for Joni folded out into my life in the same way as it had for Dan: slowly and steadily, deepening with time and knowledge. Even now, both loves are still unfolding, still surprising me with their ability to change and expand and bring out new colours — in me and in them.
I write this in the hope that my words can be a kind arm around the shoulder for any new mothers who are secretly ashamed about not falling instantly in love with their babies, just as Mira’s words were for me. To them I will say this: love is not a feeling that is gifted to you the second your baby is placed in your arms, just as it isn’t the moment you sit opposite someone on a first date. Because while the feeling of being ‘in love’ comes and goes, ebbs and flows, the action of loving is a decision we make every day. Sometimes it’s choosing to love someone even when we don’t feel lovingly towards them. It’s not only loving a sweet, soft, smiling baby, but loving a child when they throw a tantrum in the supermarket aisle, or when they throw food on the floor when you’re already late to be somewhere. Perhaps, then, choosing to love our babies when we don’t feel that instant rush of love at birth is actually a good opportunity to practice, not only for the rest of parenthood, but for all our relationships. (Oh, and on a practical level: it’s much easier to feel connected to a baby once they learn to look you in the eyes.)
I used to envy people who fell in love at first sight, like the couple at that dinner party. And now? I’m so grateful for the way love has revealed itself more gradually, because it has given me space to marvel at its complexities, to see the beauty in the effort it requires. Some days I look at an old friend, or at my husband, or at Joni, and feel the weight of all the years of knowing them, of all the difficult weeks in which we struggled and tried to love each other anyway. I think, look how far we’ve come! And the depth of this feeling reminds me: slow-burn love stories don’t make for the best pithy dinner table anecdotes. But they do make a wonderful life.
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn, published by Viking, is out now
Should you be concerned about post-natal depression, you can contact PANDAs on 0808 1961 776 https://pandasfoundation.org.uk/ or speak to your midwife or GP.