It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was expecting a powerful wave of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby, all I felt was complete despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, sang to her, fed her, patted her, held her, and changed her, I felt absolutely nothing inside.
I had longed for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroads has a small shrine to the Madonna and Child. By the time I was in my late teens, I was sure I wanted to have at least one baby.
Of course, I knew almost nothing about real babies. I didn’t have the big group of siblings and extended family that many others seemed to have in the 1960s—just one sister. My parents both had difficult childhoods. They tried for a third child, but the baby died before birth, and my mother nearly died too. From then on, having children was only linked to tragedy.
We lived in Rome, where my father worked for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The few babies I saw in real life seemed boring or noisy. My mother kept herself distant from them. Sadly, she lost her own mother when she was two years old, so she and her brother were passed around like semi-orphans between two sets of relatives, neither of whom loved them. She was a wonderful mother when I was little, pouring into me and my sister all the love she had craved as a child, but later on, things changed.
So where did this desire to have a baby come from? I had a godmother, a woman who adores all children and gave me a lot of the love and warmth I missed at home. It was her fourth child, born when I was in my early teens, who first made me think that a baby is something wonderful. Because just looking at a baby isn’t enough, I think. Visually, a baby can seem almost strange, with its bald, oversized head and short limbs. You have to hold and smell that warm, moving bundle of flesh and vulnerability to feel: I want this too.
My due date came and went. Then a week passed, then another. I was huge, and I still had to beg to be induced after more than 44 weeks.
As a young feminist with access to free contraception, I could and sometimes did sleep with men out of curiosity, desire, loneliness, admiration, boredom, or naivety. Only when I left the worst of them did I step back and wonder why I kept choosing such terrible partners. As I reread Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, I realized that what I really wanted was what they described—not in terms of money or class, but in moral direction: a truly good and loving man, with whom I could have a child.
I was lucky enough to find him. We got married, and since it was the 1980s, we could buy a tiny one-bedroom, one-living-room cottage in Kentish Town, northwest London, on just one salary—mine, because he had just finished his PhD. At last, we could start a family.
But babies don’t arrive on demand. I had a miscarriage, which I’m pretty sure was connected to feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach when my first novel was harshly reviewed. I wrote a second novel, which was better received, and started a third, A Vicious Circle, a satire inspired by Vanity Fair. We moved into a bigger home. This time, the pregnancy lasted.
Like so many women, I was both thrilled and deeply anxious. Though loving and supportive, my husband was mostly absent during my pregnancy, working long hours at a startup consultancy he had recently started with two academics. Every time I needed a medical appointment, including an amniocentesis test for suspected chromosomal problems, he was abroad. I went to boring NCT classes, but only one person in my friend group had children, and my relationship with my own mother in Italy was strained.
“Don’t worry, birth isn’t an illness,” my (male) doctor reassured me when I told him I was worried about childbirth. I had reason to be concerned, as an asthmatic and a woman with undiagnosed endometriosis that crippled me every three weeks. “It’s all perfectly natural.”
I felt like I knew my baby intimately, just byThe way she moved inside me—I could see the outlines of her limbs, like something about to break through the surface of water, both deeply mysterious and familiar. When a police car passed by with sirens wailing, she responded with strong kicks from long, powerful legs, just like her dad’s, and with a temper I was sure came from me. I couldn’t wait to meet this new person, and I was certain I would love her right away. How could I not, after wanting this for ten years?
My due date came and went. Then a week passed, then another. I was huge, and I still had to beg my GP to induce me at over 44 weeks. Only when I was hooked up to a monitor and my baby showed signs of distress did the hospital finally agree to break my waters.
What followed were 20 awful hours. An induced labor doesn’t progress like a natural one. You go from feeling “normal” to something like severe seasickness much faster. Hours of nausea dragged on. I wasn’t dilating, so I couldn’t get an epidural, and the pain was unbearable. All I cared about was that our child would survive, and I made my husband promise that if it came down to choosing between my life and our baby’s, he would pick hers.
“I’m not going to lose either of you,” he said, trying to reassure me.
Back then, University College Hospital didn’t inspire much confidence. It was a red-brick Victorian building falling apart, with bathrooms covered in blood and filth, and junior doctors exhausted from working 80-hour shifts. The maternity ward was filled with the animal sounds of women in labor—moaning, groaning, wailing, panting—sounds of effort and pain that I soon joined in with. I finally got an epidural, but my baby was stuck. Just before midnight, my husband told me there were 13 people in the room, performing an episiotomy and an emergency forceps delivery. Suddenly, our daughter was there.
She weighed just under 4.5 kilograms, or 10 pounds. I had lost so much blood that it felt like I’d been in a car crash. My husband, his jeans soaked in blood up to the knees, was completely in love.
“Isn’t she wonderful?” he said. “Well done!”
I felt absolutely nothing. It was as if the epidural that had numbed my lower body had also cut off my emotions. I lay awake all night in the recovery ward, waiting for the famous “glow” of new motherhood, listening to other mothers sob as the anesthesia wore off. It reminded me of being back in a dormitory at boarding school, where I had learned to bury everything except anger.
Anger has often helped me push through exhaustion, and it’s how I react to threats. I believe every woman who goes through childbirth has experienced something like war. Or, as Medea says, “I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”
Many of us have something like PTSD because of poor maternity care. My treatment, from both my GP and the hospital, came at the tail end of 18 straight years of Conservative government, which cut NHS funding to the bone. But it also reflects how our culture—unlike, say, ancient Sparta—doesn’t seem to honor mothers. It didn’t help that in the early 1990s, there were more men than women in general practice, and more male obstetricians (76%). It’s not that men can’t be excellent doctors, but they might be less likely to treat women like sheep if they understood how different women’s bodies are from the “norm”—meaning men’s—and how dangerous childbirth still is for us. They might have performed a C-section when faced with a pregnancy as overdue as mine.
Once our baby started crying, nonstop every night, all night, it felt like a battle between my anger and hers. I was sent home from the hospital the next day. I had received a large blood transfusion (which, because it was wrongly matched, then threatened my life).Two years later, I had my son. As a parting gift, I picked up a verruca from the filthy bathroom. My groin felt like it was filled with a bouquet of barbed wire, and I could barely walk. My husband was very worried about my physical health, but it didn’t occur to him that my mind was also struggling. Seeing how shaken he’d been by the delivery, I didn’t want to tell him either.
Once our baby started crying—which she did relentlessly every night, all night, and most of the day too—it felt like a battle between her rage and mine. If anyone had tried to take her from me, I would have fought them like a tigress. But protectiveness isn’t the same as love. We named her Leonora after the heroine of Beethoven’s Fidelio, a name that means both “light” and “lion strength” in different languages. Still, she was in danger. The heel-prick blood test that every newborn gets showed she had congenital hypothyroidism. About one in every 3,500 babies in the UK is born with this condition. If left untreated, it used to be called cretinism. That term isn’t used anymore, but for Leonora to grow up properly, she needed daily doses of thyroxine, which her thyroid gland couldn’t produce. A baby’s brain grows 75% to 80% of its total weight in the first two years, with the fastest growth in the first 90 days. This meant that, even though I was unwell, I had to take her to Great Ormond Street Hospital every three days and let them stick a needle in her tiny hand to test her blood. I felt like a monster every time she screamed.
The guilt and misery were overwhelming. She had her father’s excellent legs, as I’d guessed, and my awful temper, but she seemed to hate me. My husband went back to work after just half a day of paternity leave. He did all the cooking and laundry, but he was also chronically sleep-deprived. I silently blamed myself for everything, and the depression I’ve battled my whole adult life grew stronger. My GP seemed more concerned that I should start doing pelvic floor exercises, and my health visitor focused on my baby gaining weight. No one asked how I was feeling, so I lied to everyone, saying I’d never been happier, and carried my rage like a flaming torch into a dark place.
My parents flew over from Italy for a short visit but seemed almost as lost as I was. My father wanted to toss her in the air like he did with me, because he thought her startled reaction was cute. My mother has always been afraid to talk about depression—when I was growing up, she’d often snuggle up to me and say, “I wish you were my mother.” My mother-in-law, to her credit, immediately offered to donate blood when she heard I needed a transfusion, but she wasn’t a match, and she believed “the blues” shouldn’t be discussed. Close friends visited, but again, how could they understand without having gone through childbirth themselves?
They were best friends. Then one had a baby, while the other struggled. Two brutally honest takes on what happens when motherhood affects friendship.
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According to a 2016 study by the NCT, as many as one in three new mothers struggle to bond with their newborn. In those pre-internet days, I had no idea about this. Guilt, shame, alienation, and depression go against the accepted norms of motherhood, so of course we’re discouraged from talking about it—even though it’s especially common among those who’ve had a difficult labor and birth.
There was no break. I was feverish and sick, both physically and mentally. I got mastitis, which made breastfeeding feel like a red-hot needle was being pushed into my nipples, and I needed three rounds of antibiotics, which upset my baby’s digestion. The thyroxine tablets Leonora would have to take every day for the rest of her life gave her body and brain what they needed to grow normally, but I was convinced she was brain-damaged from the long labor and would never improve. In total exhaustion, I repeatedly thought about killing myself. The only thing that stopped me was knowing what my own mother had gone through growing up.Losing my mother stopped me in my tracks. (Now, when I see news reports saying suicide is the leading cause of death after childbirth, and that maternal suicide rates are 74% higher than in 2019, I feel hopeless.)
But then, seven weeks after the birth, something changed.
My husband kept saying Leonora was smiling, but all I saw was a faint, goblin-like grimace—probably just gas. To me, it felt more like mockery. Then one day, her blurry blue eyes seemed to suddenly focus.
Right after that, her mouth, usually turned down or crying, began to curl upward. She made strange, squeaky sounds, and then her whole face lit up with a huge, unmistakable smile. She seemed not just to recognize me, but to greet me with pure love and joy.
People talk about feeling “seen,” and she really did seem to see not just my face, but my deepest self—and to find it wonderful. I knew, logically, that a baby’s smile is an evolutionary trick to help them survive. Still, it was a joy so sharp it almost hurt.
“Oh!” I said. “It’s you. It’s you.”
Of course, there were still plenty of cries and sleepless nights ahead. But that first smile changed me forever. I became a different person. My relationship with my mother, which had been full of pain and difficulty, became easier. I felt compassion for her that grew deeper once I truly understood that losing her own mother at age two meant a part of her had stayed frozen forever. I at least had my wonderful godmother; she had no one.
I loved literature, but nothing I read prepared me for life after childbirth. What happened after marriage was glossed over in the Victorian novels I adored: Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester recovers his sight just enough to see the child she places in his arms, and unlike her author, she doesn’t die from pregnancy complications. Even more modern writers, from Fay Weldon to AS Byatt, avoided the topic. When I was writing A Vicious Circle (1996), five years before Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (2001), there was nothing about how devastating childbirth could be. I was determined to give my experiences to one of my two heroines, and I was criticized for it by Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, who said I included “revolting details about childbirth.” But I could have added so much more, because I lied in that book: I redeemed one of my heroines by having her instantly love her daughter.
Many things have improved since my first experience of motherhood. Under Labour, UCH was rebuilt as a shiny new hospital, my GP practice was filled with wonderful young doctors—mostly women—and we had a son, Will. His birth was very different from his sister’s, and to my relief, I was able to bond with him right away. Because while having a baby brought me unimaginable misery, the life-changing love, joy, and courage of motherhood are also real—and we don’t talk about that enough either.
My daughter, Leon, grew up to be a novelist herself, and as healthy, loving, beautiful, and brilliant as I could have ever hoped. I no longer need a fire in the darkness. I have light.
Amanda Craig’s 10th novel, High and Low, the sequel to A Vicious Circle, is published by Abacus on 7 May.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs generated from the perspective of the article title covering the emotional complexity of the topic
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 Is it normal to feel nothing when your baby is born
Yes it is surprisingly common Many new parents expect an instant flood of love but for some the feeling is numbness shock or even confusion This does not mean you are a bad parent
2 Does feeling nothing mean I dont love my baby
No Love can be an action not just a feeling Taking care of your babys needseven when you feel emptyis a form of love The emotional bond often grows over days or weeks
3 What is the baby blues vs postpartum depression
The baby blues are mild mood swings crying and anxiety that usually fade within two weeks Postpartum depression is more intense and lasts longer Feeling nothing or a deep emptiness can be a sign of PPD
4 Should I tell my doctor or midwife how I feel
Absolutely This is a medical issue not a character flaw Doctors and midwives are trained to hear this They can screen you for postpartum depression and connect you with support
IntermediateLevel Questions
5 I expected a rush of love but felt numb What causes this
The rush of love is a societal myth Biologically a traumatic or long labor hormonal crashes exhaustion and the sheer shock of birth can flood your system with cortisol instead of oxytocin Your brain is in survival mode
6 Is it possible Im in shock
Yes Birth is a massive physical and emotional event It is very common to experience a dissociative or out of body feeling for the first few days This is often your mind protecting you from overwhelm
7 Does this happen more often with a difficult birth or Csection
Yes A traumatic birth emergency Csection or a labor that didnt go as planned can disrupt the bonding process Your body and mind need time to recover from the trauma before you can connect emotionally
8 Could this feeling be related to my own childhood or past trauma
It can be
