I was home with the girls for about a month when a friend asked, “So, do you feel like their mom yet?” It was an interesting question, and up until that point, I hadn’t thought about it; I was just living in the moment, trying to survive as a new mom of two traumatized four-year-olds who couldn’t speak English. Becoming a mom – feeling like one — can take time no matter what, but especially when you’ve adopted a child who isn’t a baby.
I’ve read a lot of adoption stories, and the experiences run the gamut: Some women start feeling attached the moment they see their child’s face in the referral photo; for others, it takes many months (or even years) after the child has come home. One mom I know who adopted a four-year-old told me she and her husband felt like babysitters for about six months after their son came home — and this was a family who had a very smooth transition.
Becoming a parent by adoption simply doesn’t afford the same bonding experiences. When you’re pregnant, your child’s life could not be more intertwined with your own — and you’ve got the physical changes and cravings to prove it. You’re nurturing that child from the get-go, providing him or her all the necessities. While it doesn’t happen for every woman, bonding usually starts long before giving birth. And if things go well, when that little one enters the world, you stare into each others’ eyes and the attachment dance begins, with hundreds of little reciprocal gestures every day. (Let me say again that I know this is not a given when you give birth, and I personally know women who struggled to attach to their babies.)
When you’re pregnant on paper only, there’s no way to attach, because there’s no one to attach to. Then, one day, you get a phone call and see a poor-quality photo, and shortly thereafter you may be meeting your child (or children) face to face. If he’s not a newborn (which, in an international adoption, they never are), you’re often looking at a little person who already has a history, memories, and a personality. The child probably doesn’t look like you, doesn’t smell like you, and may not share your culture. Yet here you are, a family — on paper, anyway.
I will never forget the moment I met my girls. It was powerful — but I didn’t feel like their mom. I just felt a strong compassion and a desire to care for them and take away their fear and pain. Our girls were very receptive to our love and attention from the moment we met (which isn’t always the case), and this has made it easier to attach to them. Even so — and even as a maternal woman who grew up the oldest of a big clan – attachment has been a process. But I can say that, after four-plus months home, I do feel like S’s & H’s mom, and not just a babysitter. And I know this will continue to grow and deepen. Hard not to, when one of them throws her arms around my neck and exclaims with gusto, “This is my mommy!!” Heart melt.
If you’re a parent — whether by birth or adoption — did attaching to your child come easy for you? When did you feel like a mom (or dad)?
Image: B snapped this of me, after a looonnng day, while playing “donkey” with S.
Hello, I'm Zoe Saint-Paul. I'm a writer, life coach, and new mama to twins who's trying to live "slower" in a speed-obsessed world. Here we chat about life and love, food and design, and everything in between -- all at the right pace. So grab some tea, pull up a chair, and join the conversation. Feel free to 
Bonding really begins for me after the baby is born. I think it’s one of the reasons I can’t call my babies by their name until I see them in person. It’s too abstract for me, otherwise. I need to see, hear, and smell them first.
I can see how this would be true, though certainly so much of what you do when you’re pregnant is with the little one’s health and well-being in mind, which paves the way for bonding in some ways, I would think?
As you point out, bonding is such a sensorial process — it involves all the senses, and engages the body, emotions, and psyche. I have learned so much about bonding and attachment the past few years and I find it fascinating. There’s so much that we take for granted in a natural/easy attachment process that we don’t realize everything that goes into it and how it so impacts neurological development, identity, empathy, etc. It’s really amazing.
I love love LOVE the image of that hug around your neck and the proclamation that went with it. Yay!
I’m goofy when it comes to bonding. I had a vivid and intensely loving dream about my babies when I was only 16, 21 years before the first one was born. Goofy, goofy, I admit, but very real nonetheless. I bonded first then and missed them from that moment until they entered my life so much later in a more tangible way.
That said, my experience with the second was different than with the first. I felt like the first was me-and-her (and Dad), whereas I was very focused with the second on making sure they bonded with each other. Not an inferior/superior experience, just different feeling to the bonding.
That’s really neat about the dream… not goofy.
Likewise, I think bonding to twins is different because you have two at once to bond with, and they’re already bonded with each other. I’m aware we have to start helping them individuate a bit more, and develop their own identities, but right now they still find a great deal of security in each others’ presence and don’t want to be separated.
I bonded within the first few minutes after the birth, but not really before. Sadly, when the doctor said to me, “okay — let’s start pushing and have that baby!” my first reaction was, “um, wait. Hang on. I mean, let’s not rush into this. Maybe we should take a little more time to discern if this is best. For everyone!” (Obviously, my epidural was working *great*.).
Even more sadly, my first reaction on seeing the light of day on my son’s face for the first time was, “…whoa. Don’t be putting that on my chest until you clean it up a bit. And what is with that color?!”
Not exactly a Hallmark moment. But the bonding started the moment I felt his warm skin on mine, and it grew by silent leaps and bounds from there.
This made me smile… I can understand the whole “whoa, are we really going to do this? What’s the hurry, folks?”
I don’t think I started to really bond with my firstborn until she started to smile at me, at about four weeks old. I had been assured by my mother and others that I would feel a rush of love as soon as I saw my child, and that totally didn’t happen. I felt great pride and exhilaration, much like the feeling one gets when finally summiting a mountain, but bonding? Not so much.
However. With my subsequent births, bonding has happened faster and faster every time, to the point of being just about instantaneous with my last child. I think the more children I have, the more I have learned to appreciate them as babies– I understand them now, I’m not expecting anything from them, I’m not scared to take care of them because I’ve done this before, etc.
One of the hardest things is when we hear everyone tell us how it’s supposed to be and then our experience does not bear it out so we think something’s wrong. So glad to hear subsequent births have been much easier when it comes to bonding and attachment.
I felt the bonding pretty quickly in my first pregnancy. I was aware of the little person inside from the day I knew for sure that I was pregnant. I used to look at the pictures of prenatal development and say, “The baby looks like that now!” Many years before I had that first baby I had decided on a name for my first daughter–and the first was a daughter, so she got the name that had been waiting for her.
In subsequent pregnancies I think I bonded almost immediately when I found out I was pregnant. I always wanted to settle on names pretty quickly so I could refer to the baby by his/her name–or their names, in the cases of my twin pregnancies!
As for twin girls… Well, my (fraternal) twin girls– who are 19 years old–are at college together and room together. They are pretty close, and I think that is just natural.
It will be interesting to see if my twins stay as close as they get older. I suspect so, though they are very different so it may take them in different directions, which doesn’t mean they won’t stay super close, of course!
I had a moment about a month after K came home (at 9 months) when she let me rock her to sleep, and in that moment, holding her asleep in my arms for the first time (at 10 months of age), I felt like her mom. She didn’t trust me enough, or know the experience of being rocked, to fall asleep in my arms before then. But at that moment, she let it happen. And by feeling that she felt safe with me, that made me feel like I was more than just some woman who took care of her, but that I was her mom.
It’s interesting to read the first comments here and see that most of the women who gave birth to their kids say they didn’t feel a bond until after the babies were born. As an adoptive mom, that sort of surprises me! We probably have somewhat different definitions of bonding, at least in part, but I can also see that it could be hard to truly bond with a baby that doesn’t exist outside of the womb yet; he or she probably seems somewhat intangible until they are born. And, in a way, that’s similar to knowing about a child who is supposedly your child, when you haven’t met the child and she lives halfway around the world.
I love this pic! Love it, love it!! Love and exhaustion…;)
Attachment and trust are ongoing and came much easier to our younger child. Our older child, fortunately, was very open to attachment and desperately wanted a family, but trust takes a very, very long time. We’re 18 months in and we’ve come very far, but there is definitely a ways to go. It makes sense, he remembers his first family, he misses them and still talks about them a lot. It’s wonderful and heartbreaking.
For me it was about feeding them. I could not feed my babies the way you’re “pressured to,” and had to use formula for both (for very different reasons), but I decided that it did not matter what society said, but I was their mama, and it was my job to get them sustenance…any way I could.