Delayed Reaction: The Evolution of a Father's Love

February 28, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 2 comments

It's guilt. Or, maybe not guilt. Maybe it's a feeling of not meeting a personal expectation. A miss. A gap between reality and the way I imagine things should be. It happened the first time six years ago. Again, three years later. Once again three months ago. The build up, the forced or chance imagining. Then the event, the birth, the aftermath.

I felt guilty with our first and, oddly, again with the next two. Holding them in the hospital, freshly cleaned and measured by a nurse. I wiped a tear from my eye, the kind of tear that comes after surviving a trauma or after the Giants win the World Series. Release. There's the hope it's something more. Looking at this child, this tiny little person and wondering how to feel. I thought I should feel overwhelmed with affection, overcome by - what? A sense of adoration? A feeling of connection? But, instead there is just release and a certain knowledge that I do not, in this moment, feel the same way for this child that my wife does. I do not feel the same connection or love. A protective instinct, to be sure, perhaps even a foreshadowing of future affection. But to process all of this in that confused and indistinct moment when everything is fuzzy and out of focus like a bad senior picture.

The next couple of months are a sleepwalk across a tightrope. You try to find new balance. Sleep. Work. Marriage and the new twists it takes. If you have older kids, you try to figure out how to relate to them, how to help them adjust to the new one. If you don't, you dust your life for fingerprints of what it used to be. But, still, you're not sure how to feel about the baby.

Your instinct to protect increases, but temper in their vividness. It just becomes a part of you, something you adapt to, like a haircut - at first shocking, then just, you. Slowly you begin to bond. You start to notice little things. The little ways she moves, the way her fingers curl. You start to notice little changes, how the hair she lost was darker than what's growing in. You get the hang of diapers - or remember how you did it. You can pour a two ounce bottle by the sound of it and muscle memory. You notice how her stomach gurgles, how her shoulders shake when she hiccups. 

Before you know it and without premonition, you realize you miss her when you're at work. The same way you did with the other kids. Then, one night when she's sleeping, you go in to check on her and find yourself saying 'I love you.' You mean it and it feels like a realization. You may have said it before, but now you mean it. You feel it. And you look back over the last three months and wonder what took so long. Why are you just now beginning to feel - or understand - what your wife felt on day one, on minute one?

With our daughter, I tried not to berate myself. I knew it would come. But it wasn't something I talked about. Not to my wife. Not to my friends. The first two times, I couldn't handle the guilt. But now with number three, I find myself more willing to talk. I asked my friends about it, about the delayed arrival of genuine affection; asked if I was just a cold-hearted creep or if they understood. They all understood. Something to do with not being a part of the process, about not being the one carrying and developing the baby. If any of us had a uterus, we might have felt differently. But that's not our system, that's not how our plumbing was designed. A father's love is powerful, but, they agree with me, it takes a little bit of time, a certain amount of adjustment.

I fell in love with my wife at first sight. We were teenagers, high school kids and I knew, quite literally, that I was going to marry her the moment she shook my hand and told me her name. I can, if I close my eyes, still hear her say it. So why don't I remember the first sounds my kids made? Why can't I remember that instant connection? It just didn't exist. Fatherly love is powerful, but it's a whole different kind of love. I fell for my wife because I could instantly imagine the details of our lives, my life with her. I can't do that with my kids, because the way I love them is not about me. It's a different kind of attachment. It's all about them. 

So, yes, there's guilt that it took a few months to really love each of my children. But what I lacked in instantaneous emotion, I have made up for in pace of growth. It's hard to imagine being able to love any of them more than I do, but every day it happens. And maybe that's what a father's love is, maybe that's how we atone.