Nobody Told Me Bonding Could Be Hard

When you become a parent, people talk endlessly about The Moment. That instant rush of love. The overwhelming connection. The magical feeling when your baby is placed on your chest and suddenly everything changes.

But what happens when that moment doesn’t come? Or worse; what happens when you’re never really given the chance?

I spotted in a Facebook group for parents of children with complex medical needs, a mum shared how guilty she felt because she hadn’t bonded with her newborn yet. And honestly I wanted to reach through the screen and hug her, because I know that feeling far too well.

The truth is, bonding difficulties are already incredibly common amongst parents of typically developing babies. Exhaustion, hormones, traumatic births, anxiety, postnatal depression, all of these things can delay attachment. Love doesn’t always arrive in a cinematic rush. Sometimes it grows slowly and quietly. But when your child is born with complications, bonding can become tangled up in trauma. And nobody really warns you about that part.

Instead of skin-to-skin, you might get wires and monitors. Instead of taking your baby home, you get hospital wristbands and fold-out chairs that double as the world's most uncomfortable bed. Instead of learning your baby’s cries, you learn the sound of alarms going off at 3am. There are parents, like me, who spend the first weeks of their baby’s life asking for permission to hold them. Parents who watch nurses change nappies, give feeds through tubes, administer medication, and soothe their child while they stand nearby feeling completely helpless. Parents who don’t get to be “mum” or “dad” in the way they expected yet, because survival takes priority over bonding.

And the guilt that comes with that is crushing. I remember feeling like everybody else had been handed a map to parenthood that I somehow missed out on. Other people seemed to float into newborn life while we were learning medical terminology we couldn’t even pronounce properly. There is nothing quite like sitting beside a hospital cot thinking, I love this child with everything in me, so why do I feel so disconnected at the same time?

The answer is trauma.

Your brain is trying to survive. Because alongside becoming a parent, many of us are also entering a grief process. And that sentence can make people uncomfortable, but it’s important to say out loud. You are not grieving your child. You are grieving the life you thought the two of you would have. The ordinary moments you imagined. The ease. The expectations. The version of parenthood you built in your head during pregnancy. And grief is complicated when your child is right there in front of you needing you to fight for them.

One of the most powerful things our hospital psychologist shared with us was the piece Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley. It has become something many parents of disabled children hold onto tightly because it explains this feeling better than almost anything else ever has, please read it! But essentially Emily says:

“When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans.

The Colosseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice…”

But then: There’s been a change in the flight plan. You've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

Emily doesn’t say Holland is bad.

She just says it’s different.

Different to what you prepared for. Different to what you expected. Different to what everybody else seems to be experiencing around you. And sometimes accepting that difference takes time. Longer than people think. Longer than social media tells you it should. Longer than the “you’re so strong” comments allow space for.

If you are in this stage right now, sitting beside your child and wondering why bonding hasn’t happened yet, please hear this clearly:

You are not failing.

You are not cold.

You are not a bad parent.

You are traumatised, exhausted, frightened, grieving, and trying to rebuild an entirely new version of parenthood whilst functioning on no sleep and pure adrenaline.

Bonding doesn’t always happen in a single moment. Sometimes it happens drip by drip. In tiny victories. In learning your child’s cues. In advocating at appointments. In the first smile. The first time they relax against you. The first time you realise you know exactly what they need before anybody else does.

Sometimes love arrives loudly. Sometimes it arrives quietly after survival mode finally loosens its grip. And if I can give one piece of advice to parents entering this world, it’s this:

Get therapy.

Not because you’re broken or because you’re coping badly. But because this experience is enormous, and most people around you will never fully understand its weight. There is trauma in watching your child suffer. There is trauma in living inside hospitals and the relentless uncertainty. And there is also healing in finally saying out loud, “This is hard.” Because it is hard. Beautiful too, sometimes overwhelmingly so. But hard.

You can adore your child and still mourn the ease you lost. You can feel grateful they survived and still feel devastated by what happened. Those feelings can exist together. And over time, what once felt unfamiliar slowly becomes home.

Not Italy. But Holland.