Michelle1's son is mostly attached to his father, which she attributes to her feelings of detachment during the first six months of his life.

Transcript

And he was patient and he tried to give me a lot of space but it was very frustrating for him too so there were times where he would get frustrated that I didn’t care, that I didn’t want to hold my son. I didn’t want to hold my son, I didn’t want to play with him. You know, he suffers from stress, he suffered from PPD, he had some physical things happen to him that were the result of that summer. But we are in a much better place.

I mean he always loved my son or our son, he always loved him from the beginning. I mean he was tired but he had no issue bonding with him and in fact there’s primary and secondary bonding and since birth my son has been – he has been the primary bonder, bondee. [laughs] My son has primarily bonded to him.

So, I’m the secondary bonding person. So, when my son gets hurt he looks towards my husband, when my husband comes home he’s super happy. You know, when there’s the two of us on the weekend, he prefers to be with my husband. And a large part I’m sure is because I was detached, I was detached for the first six months or so of his life.

Interviewer: How do you feel about that now?

It still hurts, it still hurts at times and I try not to take it personally. And I know that the secondary is still a very important figure. I understand there’s another window for attachment around 18 to 24 months so I may take advantage of that. But you know what, it’s not that bad because again, my husband can’t be in the room without my son wanting to be held or interrupt in some way with him. So, that gives me a break because I don’t know if I could be with him all day and then still have him want me when my husband gets home, that would be pretty brutal. But there’s one example, my husband and I did our second overnight. Sorry, about a couple of months ago we did our second overnight, or a month ago, and my mother looked after him.

Interviewer: Meaning you went away and left him –

Yeah we went away and we left my son with my mother in our house. And she looked after him overnight and we came home, we had been gone for 24 hours, we left about say around noon and came back noon the next day and the look he gave us was anger and betrayal all at the same time. He didn’t want to go to me at all, he didn’t want to go to my husband at all. He just held onto grandma. And then my husband eventually coaxed him after a minute or two and then I took him from my husband and he started crying and wanted to go back to my husband. And that hurt, that hurt a lot. So, we’ve decided we can’t leave him again overnight for awhile.

But I knew that wasn’t personal, that was just him being a baby and being upset that we were gone. But it still makes me sad. And the other thing that sort of makes me sad is not being able to breastfeed him. So, as I was getting better I, you know, there’s been times I sort of miss that close connection with him. But at the same time I know I wouldn’t want to be doing it every three hours. [laughs]

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