Bonding Blues

Expecting to fall in love with your baby during pregnancy seems as normal as the ceaseless craving for sleep. But after the baby is born, some women find the instant connection they anticipated feels more like a wrong number.

When pregnant with her first child, Katie Ertel touched her stomach and talked to her daughter, Baila, all day. "She was part of me," Ertel explains. But after Baila's birth, the new mother's feelings changed. "I would look at her in the hospital, and I couldn't connect. It felt like I was living someone else's life," Ertel recalls. "It was almost like she wasn't my baby." She says it took several weeks to make the connection with Baila-and admits a good support system and nursing made the difference.

"I hear from a lot of moms after they go home," says Sherri Mendelson, RNC, a member of the BabyWise education program at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, Calif. "They say they didn't feel that they loved their babies right away and were surprised by that."

Other people's expectations are one factor keeping moms mum. "Because the feelings don't seem appropriate, they model the norm. But when they go home," says Mendelson, "reality hits."

Carolyn Christensen, a single mom, realized she wasn't bonding with her daughter Brianna while in the hospital. "When I came home, it got scary," she says. During her pregnancy, she did everything by the book and expected a normal delivery. But she had a difficult pregnancy and a nightmarish delivery. "Nothing went right," she notes. Scared, disillusioned and alone, Christensen enlisted the support of family and friends, who took care of mother and child until they found their own rhythm.

Philadelphia-based William Singletary, M.D., a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, advises women to ease into the mothering role, and says some parents' expectations are based on mythical ideals. "I think there's a myth about bonding. It's almost as if it's a biological process that happens at a particular time," he says. "I think of it more as an attachment that develops, grows and becomes richer over days, months and years."

But if you should worry-when? According to Marshall H. Klaus, M.D., author of Bonding: Building the Foundations of Secure Attachment and Independence (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995), studies indicate that 25 percent of mothers feel a bond before the birth, another 25 percent at the birth, and another 40 percent a week or more after the birth. Klaus recommends early contact, suckling in the first hour and rooming-in for moms to facilitate bonding.

He cautions, however, that continued bonding difficulties more than three weeks after the birth might be on the outer margins of normal.