The Bliss of Motherhood

A day like Friday (previous post), in which the girl puts me on trial, wears me out. Days like that leave me feeling physically exhausted and emotionally gutted. I am constantly wracked with guilt over the fact that I am not a "natural" mother. I find the whole business hard work. I always considered myself a very maternal person, there was not a stray animal or human that I have ever come across that I haven't rescued, befriended or eventually slept with. I look after people; I am a nurturer by nature. I predicted that this nurturing instinct would be ten fold for a child I had borne. Not so.
Don't get me wrong – from the minute the girl was born my protective instinct was fierce. When she was a few days old and I was still in intense pain from the damage I had sustained during her birth I leapt across a room to rescue her when she did her first mega spew. I was actually unable to move without an extraordinary amount of pain and normal activity was performed very slowly and carefully. But the instant I saw her spew I was up and across the room and had her in my arms (ripped from the arms of another) and was tending to her in less than two seconds. It was only later when I realized my sudden burst of activity had burst something else and I was bleeding more heavily. I guess that story is to illustrate that from the beginning I was protector and carer extraordinaire, but I felt no love. I actually didn't feel any connection to her at all. I was waiting for her real mother to show up on the doorstep and take her back. There was certainly no correlation between the screaming, demanding baby in my arms to the little friend I had carried and loved passionately for 9 months. This disconnected feeling remained, interestingly enough, until I chucked her father out of my home. From that point my relationship with her on an emotional level began. She was two years old.
From that time I started to relax, grew to love her and started to allow myself to believe that she loved me. I still carry an enormous amount of guilt over the fact that I didn't actually love her for a long time. When I hear about women who fall in love with their babies the instant they see them I feel a mixture of disbelief, confusion and jealousy. These days I am passionately and blindly in love with my daughter. She is the most precious and wonderful thing in my life. But still I struggle. I just don't like playing Barbies and colouring in and playing hide and seek (which I am very good at – she never finds me even though I always hide in the shower). I have to force myself and feel hypocritical and fake the whole time. So on days when she really puts me to the test, takes all of my patience and tolerance and kicks the shit out of them, I feel an emotional and physical exhaustion that overwhelms me.
The husband made me stay in bed for most of Saturday. He has gaffa taped a TV and DVD player to the rail over the foot of our bed and I watched my newest DVD: Frederick Mitterrand's version of Madam Butterfly. It is a masterpiece, but in hindsight probably not the best thing to watch given my psychological state as I howled for ages. Cathartic perhaps.
I ran away from home for three hours on Sunday and today am feeling much better. It is almost 4pm and the girl and I have not had a single argument. We are pottering about, doing the laundry (first rain free day in weeks), trying to fix up her room which is in constant chaos and waiting for an electrician to come and fix the mess I made trying to wire in our new chandeliers. Whoops.