My baby breaks my heart ten times a day. He cries, and I want to (and sometimes do) cry, too. I think of the things that will happen to him when he's older - that he'll fall in love with someone who won't love him back, that he'll get sick or break bones, that he'll try to achieve something and will fail, and that I won't be able to help. Sometimes, when he's snuggled in my lap and a sleepy smile spreads across his face, I'm flooded with love for him so deep that I feel like my joy can't be contained. All of these kinds of heartache, the good and the bad, I expected; they're deeper and more encompassing that I could have guessed, but I'd heard about them from other parents.
But sometimes, I feel a little heart broken because I don't think I love my baby the way that I should. Sometimes, he seems like nothing so much as a warm, pudgy robot. Who is he? What is he? What could he possibly be thinking? And how did he end up in my house, demanding so much that I'm not sure I can give?
If a car fell on top of him, I don't think I would be overcome by one of those heroic motherly bursts of strength and be able to lift it off of his body. At times I feel like I love him on the same level - okay, a little more, but not dramatically - as I love my dog. And I'm not one of those dog-obsessed people who tries to bring their dog to dinner parties. I recognize that my dog is not a person. So I guess that means that my baby doesn't feel like a person to me - probably because he doesn't use much nonverbal or any verbal language, and he's such a tumultous mass of bodily functions. People say babies develop personality after a few months, and, though Axel certainly seems to be showing glimmers of being chatty like his father, generally cheerful like his mother, and headstrong like both parents, it's a shadowy version of person-ness.
Shouldn't I, as his mother, feel a gushy sense of love for him constantly, instead of vascilating between adoration and detached thoughts about my son's resemblance to all of the drawings I've ever seen of big eyed, bulbous-bellied aliens? Shouldn't I be able to automatically say that, if there were some horrible deathly virus spreading the earth and I could only save one person, I would pick my son, instead of knowing that, in that highly unlikey situation, I would have to really think about it? Shouldn't I automatically want to change his diaper when I hear him poop, rather than thinking that it's not so bad for him to sleep a little longer and he'll be fine if he stays dirty for awhile, and having slight twinges of, dare I say, unreasonable resentment that he couldn't have gotten all his poop out before I changed his diaper just ten minutes ago?
He still, after six weeks, feels so foreign to me. Moments after I wonder if he's just a crazed little beast come to drive me batty by screeching in my ear, he flashes me a grin and burrows his head into my shoulder, and I tell him, honestly, that I love him more than I can say. I adore my son - in ways I could not have guessed that I would, and just the thought of losing him threatens to rend my aorta to shreds - but also, in some ways, less than I thought I would. My mom always says that she liked me and my brother more as we grew older, as she learned more about who we were and as we could talk, and tell her what we were thinking and what we needed. In some ways, I think that means she loved us more, too - though she'd never say that - and that her love for us evolved and changed as we did. I'm still in the midst of falling in love with my boy, in my own slightly chaotic and bumpy way.
