One of my biggest concerns about having a second child was that it would change the way I felt about my first. And in the begining it did but not quite in the way I feared. For a start, my firstborn just seemed so….giant. I hadn’t expected that.
What I’d worried about was not having enough love. Or somehow having the intense love I felt for my son being compromised or reduced by the feelings I knew I’d have for a new baby. Fortunately, that didn’t happen but I was certainly a little snappy and impatient with him in the beginning. Poor little guy.
It is not uncommon to hear mothers speak with trepidation about the birth of their second child. It’s not just the hard work, the sleepless nights ahead of them and the prospect of labour that fuels this fear, but many mothers believe with much conviction that they could not love another person as much as they love their first child.
Nature is an amazing thing, and so are babies, and really, so are hormones, because when you see that second baby on the delivery table much of that fear just dissipates. Poof! it’s gone. And you get on with the business of getting to know and falling in love with this little red, wrinkly, screaming beautiful thing.
But where nature is amazing it is also sometimes fierce. It provides for protection of the young and the defenceless. It’s primal, we’re programmed to focus our love and attention on the littlest one to ensure its survival and sometimes we feel a temporary loss of maternal love for the first child, the child we thought no one could compete with.
Rebecca Abrams writes very honestly about this in
The little girl who walked through the door nervously holding her father’s hand, who scrambled up on to the hospital bed and threw herself on top of me in a wholehearted embrace, was not the child I’d said goodbye to just two days before.
A bizarre metamorphosis had occurred. Crazy and irrational as it sounds, she suddenly seemed huge to me.
No longer a little girl at all, no longer my baby – but an enormous overgrown child I barely recognised.
A week later, I was discharged from hospital and went home to a new life as the mother of two children.
Drained by a difficult pregnancy and labour, I was wholly unprepared for the emotional rollercoaster that lay ahead, caring – or trying to care – for a tetchy baby and a demanding toddler.
I became the kind of mother I never dreamt I’d be; the kind who coos at her baby and, in the next breath, snaps at her bewildered toddler.
Before my second child was born, I’d vaguely worried about whether I would be able to love the baby. The terrible truth was that in those early days with two children, it was not the baby but my daughter whom I had difficulty loving.
Rebecca with her family
Post partum depression or maternal instinct to look after your new born infant? So many mothers suffer silently with this very real shift in love when their second child is born. Did you feel differently to your oldest child when your second was born? And if you haven’t had a child do you remember the feelings of pride or resentment when a sibling was introduced into your family?
How do you fit a new child seamlessly into a family? Can you?
Top Comments
I was so protective of my first daughter, I didn't want to do anything that would put her at a disadvantage, emotionally or financially. We waited 7 years before we had another child, and really because we didn't want our daughter to grow up alone. I was so worried I wouldn't love it
But I am so down on myself, I find myself being all sweet and loving with the baby, but I have no patience with my first daughter. Where once I would have reached out and touched or kissed her I now find myself almost wriggling away from her and almost shrinking away from her. I am not sure if she is pushing my buttons or she has always been this way, but she is doing really dumb things that push me until my head feels like it is going to explode.
I am so worried about the way I speak to her that I could emotionally scar her, she is so sensitive and easily hurt. Every day I say to myself, today I will be sweeter with her, but by morning tea time, I turn into this horrible nasty angry person, the sound of my voice when I speak to her must hurt, and at the time I have to fight with myself not to say things that are really mean.
What is wrong with me?
Wow, Having just given birth to my second child 2 weeks ago I am feeling
out-of-touch and not so in adoration of my almost 6 year old. I am
quick to snap at her over little things and do not approach her with the
patience and soothing care I did just 2 weeks ago. It is comforting to
know this response is felt by others and that it will pass. I think I
will make some mother-daughter time this week to remember and focus on
the young lady I love so deeply.
I am planning to get pregnant with my second soon and I must admit I have wondered about this. Thank you Mia and commentors for your honest and candid responses.