Parents’ experiences of meeting and bonding with their babies

I mean there was a beautiful feeling as well of him coming out ... they put the baby on your chest, and he was kicking and kicking and kicking, that was the most amazing feeling 'cause all - I just thought, 'That is my little baby who's been inside me, those are the same kicks, those kicks are familiar, and now they're on the outside of me'. That was just beautiful, but to be honest that was probably the one positive part of it [laughs].

I mean on a positive note I didn't have any expectations of the - I didn't expect to feel so much love for a little person, I think I actually love him more every day and you know that phrase when somebody says 'You're so cute I could eat you up'? I actually felt that with [my son] where I have cuddled him and I've thought - 'I could consume you, you're so amazing'.

And I think that might be a natural mum thing because he was part of me at one stage, and just cuddle him so close to be part of me more. And that - I never expected to feel this love for a child.

I can't imagine, to me, I still replay the day in my mind and when she cries and I can't settle her I think how amazing that was when she was born. The avalanche of feelings that absolutely overwhelm me the moment she was born, she melted my heart. I never expected so much love for a little person. When I was pregnant and people asked me if I was excited, I often just said, "Probably I feel more scared of what's to come". And I probably did not feel the maternal instincts that some women have during pregnancy. I quite often joked how this was a statistical decision for me to fall pregnant. And fertility stats were really encouraging me to finally start my family, don't postpone it, don't leave it any longer. So that amount of feelings I had for her, the very second I held her, absolutely amazed me.

And I remember telling my husband, in my tears, "One of the first things is we are parents". Because parents are born in that same moment and you really feel that and you experience it, so that day will be probably be in my mind forever. And it's by far the most incredible day in my life. It ranks well above my wedding and other exciting moments in my life.

And now we can focus on giving her the best we can to become the person she deserves to be. To nurture her potential and the nurturing, in a way, to giving yourself to them. It's so precious and I can see how parents get trapped in seeing their goals and potential realised in their children. But in a way you do want them to excel and to have a happy, healthy life.

I met my girlfriend, we got knowing each other a few months. I got her pregnant and then I had my first child. When I first found out I was going to be pregnant I didn't welcome it and then reality just hit me, that I wasn't getting younger. And then maybe at first, maybe I could find ways of trying to understand or maybe parenting wouldn't be so bad after all.

So August the 22nd 1996, I'm proud to say my daughter was born here in [city name] [hospital name]. And I'll never forget this moment when I know her mum was screaming, giving birth, and there was doctors. It was like there was chaos everywhere but as soon as my daughter was born, I felt like there was a bright light just shining straight into the room and I just saw, before my own eyes, a miracle. A miracle before my own eyes, a baby being born. I couldn't believe it. That was another happy moment in my life. Just watched my baby girl being born.

They were pulled out behind the curtain and taken off and cleaned up and brought over to me one at a time. So I kind of had the curtain here I think. It was very close. So they were right in my face. The first thing is they were so close - since I'm past 40 my eyesight has started to change since I was 40. So they were so close - I could barely focus on them. I'm sort of going, 'Oh, you know', like this. I'm thinking, 'I really need glasses on to be able to see them clearly'. Now how stupid is that? That's not something you think of when you're having babies, that you're not going to be able to see them.

The second thing is that you hear all these fairytales about, 'Oh my God, I saw them and I bonded with them straight away and it was love at first sight. I've never loved anyone as much as I love my own child', and the thing that really shocked me the most when I saw them was I didn't think that and I thought you know - you always think that is just the most crazy thing and how could - and you won't know it 'til it happens. But I just think that is such a load of rubbish.

They're small and they're pink and they're tiny and they're vulnerable and they're detached from you. And they're individuals and of course you wanted them so much you've gone through all these incredibly ridiculous traumatic events to get to that point. But how can you love something at first sight? It's the fairytale and it's just hokum. It's just rubbish. You build a bond and you build a relationship with someone as you go. But I don't think that first sight - I don't think I thought that at all.

And I had one brought out and there's one little face I can't focus on and then another little face I can't focus on and I - "Hello", you know and their eyes are shut, so it's not like they're engaged with you or anything. I know that sounds really terrible. It's nothing against them. They are a wonderful and all those things that I ever wanted. But it's not that I felt let down. I just thought, 'Yep, here's some more reality that's pushing aside all of that rubbish'.

I just was so scared and you know I was really afraid that, because I was so frustrated with myself that I would take it out on him but when I learnt how to cope with settling him and understood what babies were like [laughs] it got so much easier. So it really sort of - yeah the bond kind of grew from there and my love for my son just got that much more intense and now it's all good.

I don't know. I remember it but I think I was just really overwhelmed and I was glad he was here and safe and you know everything turned out great and he was healthy and had 10 fingers and 10 toes. But I don't know, I think that rush of love wasn't - I mean it kind of wasn't there. I think I was just still in my sort of medicated state and just feeling a little - really overwhelmed by it all.

But I think that happened while I was in hospital. That love just grew and I've never been so in love with something. You know like it's - it's really, really wonderful. He's just something else. Something so special. But that sort of came.

Because if you meet someone for the first time you sort of don't know what their personality is like - you're getting to know this little person and their personality traits and when they're newborn they just eat, sleep and poop [laughs] and that's all they basically do and they cry - a lot. And it's hard to know what to do with them. I was a bit afraid of him for a little while [laughs]. So it's hard to get that bond happening.

And so when they said, "It's a girl," that was exciting; I was quite happy with that. And I had a very brief amount of time - the two of us were all in gowns and everything. So there's no skin-to-skin or anything like that and then I was sent off to recovery for two hours, ages, 'cause I'd lost quite a lot of blood, apparently. And then we went back and my partner and my best friend were there with our daughter. And so she'd had this lovely time, you know, kind of obviously probably a bit hungry but, you know, otherwise being held by those two. So it was 3 a.m. or something by then and we called my parents. And they tried to get me to breastfeed. And then my partner couldn't stay 'cause I was in the normal ward. I had a shared room and everything.

And, yeah, so in the end we stayed in hospital for five days. That was a bit stressful because of the caesarean my milk didn't come in fast enough and she wasn't regaining her birth weight fast enough. And so there was a bit of pressure around formula and all that sort of thing. And the breastfeeding was really difficult.

And I just also remember like those - just the nights in the hospital, like, you know, being on your own and not having a clue what to do. And, like, I think our baby was just really hungry so she was crying a lot... like it seemed more than all the other babies. And I just remember one night like, you know, being pretty miserable and trying to sing to her. And I just couldn't even sing 'cause I was crying so much [laughs]. And I remember at that time thinking, "Oh my god, what if she's this really high-strung personality and it's gonna be like this forever? I'll never be able to calm her down" [laughs].

So we started out parenthood from a very angry place. Angry that the system we were in that we thought we would be comfortable with and understand what was going on from one point to another, it didn't happen and I don't know why and they offered us counselling because in the follow up days we talked about the labour with the [midwife program name] midwives, and we got ours back, she's wonderful.

And my partner was, at that point, a lot more traumatised by it than I thought I was but declined to have counselling. Just sort of felt heard. So, it was fine but I think in retrospect it probably would have been good for both of us to have a bit of trauma counselling [laughs] about it. Purely because it was so different to what we thought it would be.

And that sort of began this really conflicting period where we had this divine, precious little bundle of gorgeousness who had changed our life for ever and I had no idea what to do and the grief that I felt was just like nothing I had ever imagined. I cried for two weeks straight.

The Olympics was on, and I remember [laughs] we've got this modular couch thing, and because we didn't know what to do with her and she cried all the time because she was refluxy, and she was hungry because she wasn't attaching. I didn't know - so we set the couch up so that we were all basically sleeping out here and she was sort of propped up between five cushions or something.

It was just so bad, but we had no idea what we were doing. I remember sitting on the couch, watching the Olympics - because it was in the UK - until all hours of the morning just crying, thinking, 'What have I done? I can't go to a gig, I can't go out for dinner. What the fuck have I done?'

And that's how I felt about the situation is that I had done a bad job of labour and a bad job of birthing and a bad job of pregnancy. And so it just followed that I thought that I'd do a bad job of mothering and I did do a bad job of mothering in the beginning because I was angry.

I loved her and I cuddled her but I got really frustrated with her and I was very rigid and very like, 'Oh, I can't get her into any bad habits', and people would say, "Oh, but for the first 12 weeks it doesn't matter", and I'd be like, 'But that, how can that possibly - how can she hit 12 weeks and go right, don't do anything bad now because my habits are going to start to form. How will she know when she hits 12 weeks?'

All these things that people were telling me didn't make any sense. So the reality was it was total chaos and I was a ball of self-doubt and self-hate and confusion and conflicting everything, and it was messy. My house was messy and I was messy and I didn't like either of those things [laughs].

Oh, it was great, I mean that was really nice but it's hard 'cause you're not with the surrogate mums in person ... and you don't see the babies being born 'cause, for cultural reasons, they don't like you in the same - in the birthing unit with the surrogate, for privacy. So it's only an hour after the birth you're holding your kiddies but still it was lovely at that stage. There was some anxiety in those first few days for my partner, the first few weeks, about how do we bring kids up? We've been given these two children and suddenly we've got to learn how to bottle feed them and nurse them and he panicked a bit and said, "Oh my God, I don't know what to do". I remember him running around the hotel in Delhi looking for a woman, any woman, when we had the kids come home from the hospital, to help us, you know.

So the funny story is, you think people who go through childbirth are in a hospital gown. For me, it was like, 'What do I wear to meet my children?'

The orphanage do so much work in preparing these children, and as Human Services have said to us, if all orphanages were like [orphanage name] in the world, most children coming out of orphanages would be okay.

The work that they do with these children is extraordinary. They know love, they went to school outside of the orphanage, they were part of the community, they were not deprived, yes, they were in an environment of love. So we walked through the gates. I look up and I see [middle child name] and next minute I know this little boy just runs through to me and buries his head here. And I was just like, 'Oh my God. This is my son, what do I do?' It was just weird. So I hugged him and [youngest child's name] was with him because he'd dragged her. And then one of the ladies who's actually the social worker, she came out and she sort of ushered them off and we had to go and do paperwork.

So you got this unique situation where you've met two of your children and you have to go and do paperwork. So we've got to go up in the lift. And we're going up in the lift and there's [middle child name] and [youngest child's name] chasing the lift and [middle child name] pointing going, "That's mummy". You know, pointing, pointing, pointing. So then we do the paperwork and whatever and then it's meeting time and you've got all the other kids from the orphanage, you've got all the workers and you go into the room and they're just there. And you sit down and [oldest child's name] was like, she was 10. No contact. Nothing. [middle child's name] was all over me, [youngest child's name] was vivacious as a four-year old.

And so we had lunch and we played with the kids and then it came for the leaving ceremony, which - I was bawling my eyes out, not because I was a mum but I was looking at all these beautiful people and children at the orphanage and all that they've done for these kids and they were saying goodbye and I'm thinking, 'How hard is it for them to say goodbye to these beautiful children?' And then I spoke to them and said, "Oh no; this is our joy because this is our work. Our work is that these kids have no family and our job is to find them a family".

That was my point, he forgot me. Everything was just his own child. So, I guess at that stage he needed a teacher, he needed someone to show him that this might have a very bad effect on me too. But he couldn't understand it, everything was his child and even if I show you the photos you can understand it that in all the photos he is cuddling the baby, I'm sitting somewhere else. He's cuddling the baby, so that's why I hated my own baby. I didn't like her at all and I I stopped breastfeeding her for one month as I'm not really comfortable to breast feed her. I hate her when she touches me, I hate her.

I cuddled her, but there was no communication. I cuddled, I kiss her, but I guess it was done based on my instinct, my motherhood instinct, you know what I mean? It was not something done with very strong desire. As a person - when you are not a mum, you look at a cute baby, you like to cuddle and kiss her.

And then, after two years, I started to learn that, 'Yes, I can show her my love, my pure feeling and emotion, and then she can show me back'. And this way we establish a very good mother and child relationship together. And this way I narrow down the gap between me and my daughter.

So, do you think in the first two years you didn't have a strong connection, a strong bond?

I have a strong connection and I was challenging to gain it, I was challenging to achieve it. I was thinking of the ways to help me achieve it. On one hand, I didn't like to lose my face in front of people, I wanted to show that, 'Yes, I'm a very good mum too, like you'.

With my first it was such a fumbling experience still, I think you have this image of what happens in the movies where they deliver the baby, they go, "Here's your baby", and they take it away and you're like, 'Oh wow, something' - and so just my baby - my first was delivered onto the floor onto a pillow, because I was squatting on the floor. And so they were like, "Oh, your baby's here", and I kind of just looked down and my partner - I looked at my partner because we didn't know what we were having. And I was like, "What is it?" [Laughs] And he was, "I don't know". So I had to like look between my legs and, "Oh, it's a girl".

And then I didn't know whether I could pick her up. I didn't know what the procedure was, so I feel really bad now, I feel really dumb now that I just didn't like scoop her up and give her a huge hug. But I was like, 'Oh, do the nurses have to take her or something? I don't really know what's going on'. So then they picked her up and gave her to us. But now I'm like, 'Oh, how dumb? I can't believe I just didn't scoop her in my arms'. Because that's just what happened with my second.

She was a lot easier to get on the breast and everything than my first - my second. But I think that also with my second I was a bit more sure of how I was going to be a parent because I already had fumbled through the ways and stuff. So with my first I listened to a lot of advice that other mums gave me and it went against what I thought was right. So I felt - like lots of people - 'You need to do this and you need to do that'. And then I'd try it and still - one of my biggest regrets is letting her cry out and, we have to do it otherwise they won't learn how to sleep. And listening to her cry for that long was horrible. And then I vowed never to do that again. So I think that it's put me on my path of where I wanted to be a parent but I feel bad that she's the - probably also part of my depression - she's the first child so she gets everything done wrong to her [laughs] which probably didn't help. Like, "Oh yep," - poor first children [laughs].

But I also read this thing that also helped me, I felt, on the internet where a person had told their first that, when they were due with their second that they were very, very special and they would always be special because they're the person who made me into a mum. And I thought that was wonderful, so I told her that and now she goes around telling everyone that too [laughs]. It is quite cute. Now I'm going to have to come up with something about how my second is special [laughs].

So we had a bit of a hard time conceiving second time around. So I had three miscarriages before having [son's name]. So I think that's informed a little bit of the emotional experience this time.

That's sort of been a longer journey for both of us. So I think that sort of does impact post as well, because it's had a bit of a hard time and you're sort of still processing that once you've had the baby and so that sort of emotional energy is taken up by that. Although sometimes you don't realise that until a bit later I think. So, I suppose that's an emotional dimension that wasn't there the first time round.

It was just all, waiting for something to happen I guess, right up until even giving birth. And even after now, I've been a lot more sort of vigilant and I guess that's sort of been hard because most people will say, 'Oh yeah, second time round, it's easier, you're more relaxed, it's much easier'. And for me, it hasn't been because of that experience I've had I guess, it's been a bit of the reverse. I was pretty relaxed first time round I think and this time - I mean I don't think anything's going to happen now because he's born and he's fine.

But, I guess there's that background that things can go wrong because they have for me now. And I suppose once I've had him, there was a bit of a sigh of relief, but also a, 'Wow, that was really, really hard, that last nine months'. And you sort of let yourself then sort of feel that I guess a bit more than I did for that nine months, because it was all just, 'Let's just get there, let's just stay with it'.

And I think that part of it's more common and that's why it felt a bit harder, because I know everyone - most other people feel like that time round, second time round, it is easier for me. I haven't found that.

I think because you can see an end to it. You've been through it and you know that time, I don't know, maybe things pass. And you've already got your hand on a lot of it. You're used to lack of sleep, you're used to things being out of control, whereas... this time round, because there's a bigger break for me, I'd had more control back, I'd had more time out of the house, I'd started earning more money.

And I think that's an aspect of miscarriages and I think there's a whole body of research that looks into, I think they call it second time infertility. Not that I was infertile in the end, but that aspect can harder and lives on in a way, because there is a bigger gap than we would have wanted between our children.

So, of course, that weekend, it happened. I started bleeding and I had to go [laughs] in for an emergency caesarean. So my obstetrician wasn't actually the surgeon doing the operation. He had a team, he had another three that work in their team, so that was fine but it was sort of right up to the last sort of all these things that could happen did happen. Yeah, but the birth was just amazing and they were very good at the hospital asking, assuming that baby was fine, as soon as it was born and didn't need to be taken off to ICU or something - because it's caesarean, and they had that curtain up, what did I want to do?

I said, "I would really like to be able to actually touch the baby straight away," rather than I've seen in movies and documentaries, they'll just sort of hold the baby over the curtain and then take the baby off to weigh it. And they said, "Yep, no worries", and it was fantastic they actually, the paediatrician was in there as well, my mum was in there for the delivery and my dad was holding the fort at home and was very anxious about it all 'cause when I started bleeding, I had to go in by ambulance into hospital and it was the middle of the night and you know, drama, drama.

But they let my mum go in with video camera and they had a cam - and my mum had a camera as well. So the paediatrician was taking stills before my baby was actually delivered 'cause I guess he was waiting because he didn't have anything else to do. So he was taking photos as well. It was fantastic. I think the anaesthetist took a couple of photos for us and my mum got the footage of actually, of my son being lifted up over the curtain and being able to hold him and oh - it was amazing.

It was just such a surreal moment because I had [crying] dreamt and imagined this moment for so - well, certainly through the IVF treatment but just when you're a little girl as I say, imagining being a parent and finally here he is and he was screaming and doing all the right things and yeah, larger than life and I sort of thought, 'Thank God'. I think aside from the love which is just amazing and again, liken it to when, with my daughter, that feeling of love, that rush of love and the pride was there and there was a bit of sadness in the sense that I wish I had her here too. I wish this was my second child and I had her, being looked after by her pa at home but it was just that overwhelming love and relief. It was just like, 'Oh, thank God. It's done, he's out, he's alive, I've done it. My body's managed to do this at 37 weeks and three days gestation'. It was just amazing. So I don't know, I just, for me, it was a real turning point.

And they'd put him on the CPAP, which is basically head gear and tubes into the nose and everything like that, even though he was breathing on his own, they wanted to give him a break. So that first night he had the assistance of the CPAP and he was so tiny. He was 1.53 kilo and he was very, very fragile. But at the same time, he didn't show any signs of anything bad.

Look - three kids is a juggle, there's no doubt about that - but we got through it and we still get through it every day. So that wasn't so much the hard thing, I think - he wasn't a difficult baby, he was in such a routine because he had been in special care and they're very regimented with their feeds and all that kind of thing.

So he came home in a beautiful four hour routine, so that was one of the easy things about the whole process. I just didn't want to be out of his - I just didn't want him out of my sight. So, I literally carried him around from room to room for about three months until one day I'd been up feeding him and I'd gone into such a deep sleep, and when I woke up my husband had put him in his bedroom and said, "Now he can stay there". And he said, "You didn't even know that he wasn't there, you were asleep".

And that was probably helpful for me. I needed to let go a little bit, and get on with our life and not have the need to have him carried around with me, attached to me all the time. But it is difficult to look - especially a baby in a humidicrib and they can only be outside of the humidicrib for a certain amount of time. So the time that you have with them is very valuable, you put them down the top, you do kangaroo care and then they're taken away after about 15, 20 minutes sometimes, because of their temperature. And so when I had him home and I could basically do whatever I wanted with him, I just wanted him close to me all the time.

And so how do you feel now about - now he's nearly three, about the separation?

Good. It's got to do with the fact that he's my third child and I'm tired. I think if he was my first or my only child, I think I would probably be struggling and still have him - be holding him close, but he does care two days a week for six hours and it's good. It's good for both of us, it allows me to work on my businesses and it allows him to socialise but in particular, it's good for me. Because I need to be able to start to stop worrying all the time. Yeah, definitely.