I love that baby now, and maybe that's all that matters.

I love him from the top of his hair that never behaves no matter how much water he sprays on it or how much he combs to his eyes the size of saucers to the bottoms of his smelly little boy feet.

I love him and love him and love him so much that it feels at times my heart could explode with it.

Of course, that baby boy is no longer a baby. That baby boy started kindergarten last week.

My feelings for him didn't start out as love. I wish I could say they had. It started out as shock, and confusion. Desperation. Surreality. Protectiveness, yes. But not love. Not at first.

It started out in a deep dark. A dark so deep I didn't even think to look around for a light switch. Turns out there was one, but I didn't know that then.

When they handed him to me, a slick bundle of what was supposed to be joy, I recoiled. I stiffened.

I cringed away instead of drawing him to me, this little person I helped make and nurtured inside my body and waited for and worried over and gave up coffee and red wine for, whose progression inside me, from nausea to cravings and back to nausea, from nudges and bumps to kicks and shoves, had brought me so much excitement.

And if there were such a thing as a prolonged recoil, a cringe that lasts for months upon endless months instead of there and gone like a cringe is supposed to? Well, then I did those things, too.

He was in me and then he was out, and that's the part that just wouldn't click.

There was suddenly a baby in the room, and he--that baby who had been whisked from thin air by the doctor who must have been some sort of magician--didn't cry much, but the room was far too loud, too bustling, too bright. I didn't know where to look, who to look at. No one would meet my eyes and I wonder sometimes, even now, if anyone would have seen something in them. Something like terror. Something like falling.

The ones who weren't looking at the baby chattered over me as they toweled most of the goo off of him, too roughly it seemed to me, insofar as I could notice. The others pushed buttons on machines and handed frightening-looking surgical implements to the doctor who was still busying himself at the foot of the bed as though he were going to use that strange alchemy to make another baby appear.

No one met my eyes.

So I looked at that baby, and I felt something. They all said I'd feel something (that royal "They" who rule so much of our lives with their all-too-often wrongness), and there I was, feeling it. But even in my sort-of stupor I was pretty sure this wasn't the something they'd been talking about, those well-meaning mothers who loved their babies perfectly and instantly.

That something was the rush of darkness like someone had turned off the sun.

I still marvel at pictures from just after his birth, because somehow, incredibly, I am smiling down at him and there's no trace of that darkness on my face. I'm lightly running a finger over his button nose and across his pretty lips and dear GOD how I remember when he opened those enormous bleary eyes...!  For a moment I was irrationally certain he could see what no one else had. How could he help it, with eyes like those?

He could see the nothing inside me, I thought, and it hurt him.

When we got home and were supposed to be settling into our new life, there were many times that I would look at him and catch myself wondering when his parents were coming to pick him up.

Home didn't feel like home. I didn't feel like me. My friends felt like strangers and my husband? He tried but I was afraid to tell even him how dark it was inside me. How I couldn't see a thing. How I missed the sun. Later on even the missing faded.

Sometimes I had to remind myself to breathe.

I couldn't grasp that he was mine. I couldn't remember why we had been foolhardy enough to believe that we could be parents. I blamed my husband for not knowing better than I did that I was too emotionally fragile, too weak, too selfish, too young.

People from work came by for the first two weeks to bring us dinner. It was an incredibly thoughtful gesture that I had to work myself up to every one of those ten days. I learned how to erase the signs of hours worth of crying almost completely and how to be a gracious hostess whose hands didn't tremble constantly. And how to pretend there were still a few stitches left in my seams.

I was too good at pretending.

I consulted all Those Books to see how to get him to stop crying. He did quite a bit of that (though maybe not as much as I did). My mother told me he sensed my anxiety. At any rate, The Books didn't know me or my baby. The Books didn't fix it.

Asking for advice would've been admitting failure, or at least weakness, and I couldn't ... and then I wouldn't.

"He calms down when you take him outside for a few minutes!"

My husband, excited.

"Well that's just great. You've found the answer. Hallelujah."

Me, less so.

Because the problem, of course, wasn't him. It was me. I was broken. Sometimes I thought that when they'd yanked him out of me with those oversized salad tongs, they'd taken some part of me that had made me whole.

When did it start to change? Well, first came the love. That was pretty early on, actually, although people who think loving your baby makes the darkness easier to navigate is sadly mistaken. But it did start coming, the love. It came slowly. Oh. so. slowly.

It started during the middle-of-the-night feedings, when I would swim in those eyes and allow myself to imagine that I was doing something right. That he wouldn't look at me that way, with that intensity and utter, utter trust if I were as fundamentally flawed as I was certain I was.

My tears would drip on his little face sometimes, and I would tell him I was sorry, so, so, sorry I couldn't be what he needed me to be. His intent and nonjudgmental stare told me all I needed to know.

I began to learn his mannerisms, the way he would stick his little rear end out and fold his hands neatly under his chin, fling his head back and stretch. He looked like a turtle doing that, with his neck extended backward and his lips puffed out and little worry lines creasing his brow. I began to enjoy the way he felt snuggled against me in a tight little ball, and the way he smelled, all fresh from a bath. His head was bald and soft against my cheek.

And one day I realized that I loved him.

Still the anxiety held me, still the darkness swallowed much of my days. But there were little flashes of light, glimpses of the bright and sometimes beautiful world I'd retreated from.

And then I got help. Medicinal, at first, which helped me find my footing. And years later I found talk therapy, which helped me work through the rest. (Turns out I'd never let it go.) 

My boy grew strong and fast. Faster than you would think possible. He gave sloppy, open-mouthed kisses, and spoke in complete sentences at 9 months. He loved (and still does) to make us laugh. He said the funniest things, and I found laughter again. One, two, three, four, five.

Two days after his fifth birthday, I gave birth to his sister.

Looking down into her blotchy red face and running a finger over her perfect rosebud lips, I fell in love with her instantly and utterly. As I did, my heart broke a little for the baby boy I hadn't been quite able to embrace in the beginning, whose very existence, now, has helped make me a better person. A complete person. A mother.

I love that baby boy.