It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After a decade of yearning and a traumatic 20-hour induced labour culminating in an emergency forceps delivery, the author expected an overwhelming rush of love when her 10lb daughter was finally born. Instead, she felt absolutely nothing - utter despair, numbness, and a rage that served as a stimulant against exhaustion.
Growing up in Rome surrounded by Madonna-and-child shrines, she’d been certain she wanted a baby, despite knowing almost nothing about real ones. Her own family history was grim: a mother who lost her own mother at two, a sibling who died before birth, and reproduction associated only with tragedy. Yet a godmother’s warmth and the smell of a newborn sparked the yearning.
She found a good man, married, and endured a miscarriage after a savage novel review. A second pregnancy stuck. But her husband was largely absent during pregnancy, her GP dismissed her fears (“birth isn’t an illness”), and she was induced at over 44 weeks only after her baby showed distress. The labour was agony; she made her husband promise to save the child over her.
After delivery, she lay awake in the recovery ward waiting for the famous “glow” while listening to other mothers sob. The epidural seemed to have cut off access to emotion. She was ejected from hospital the next day with a blood transfusion, a verruca from filthy bathrooms, and a groin “filled with what felt like a bouquet of barbed wire.”
Her baby, Leonora, cried relentlessly. A heel-prick test revealed congenital hypothyroidism - one in 3,500 UK births - requiring daily thyroxine and blood tests every three days at Great Ormond Street. The author felt like a monster. Her husband went back to work after half a day of paternity leave. Nobody asked how she was feeling.
As many as one in three new mothers struggle to bond, according to a 2016 NCT study. The author had no idea. She repeatedly considered suicide, stopped only by knowing what her own mother suffered growing up motherless. Then, seven weeks after the birth, something shifted.