Bonding

Yesterday while I was driving home, there was a promotion on NPR for an upcoming feature on mother-newborn bonding and, one thing leading to another, I got to thinking about why I don’t love my car.

I parked. The automatic shoulder seatbelt which gets in the way of all my intra-car activities annoyed me. As I occasionally do, I wondered why I don’t feel the same way about my second car as I did about my firstborn. Finally, I understood. It’s because this car was stolen less twenty four hours after it came home with me. The mythical mother-baby bond was broken almost as soon as it formed. All I got was the usual post-birth weeks of sleepless nights without the benefit of having an actual baby.

I began to distance myself, for the sake of the other children, the other cars I still had to drive and feed while I waited to hear what had happened. I am not a hard woman: of course, I wondered where it was, if it was safe. But I had to protect myself from those early fears so that I could stay whole.

When I got the car back, it was too late. I had come to distrust its attachment to me and it had clearly developed other interests. We had grown apart. Our birth connection disrupted, I fear we will never be the same.