When your One-year-old climbs onto your lap and realize you, “Do you love me the best, Mama?” … what do you say? “Well, yes, but not as much as I love your Daddy?” I don’t think so. And yet, when I got pregnant, I received some not-so-gentle advice from the older women in my life: “You’re going to love this baby more than life itself. Just don’t tell your husband” said one. “You don’t want to neglect your husband, dear. Let him know he’s still the most important person in your world,” said another.But, I didn’t take their arguably sage advice. Here’s why.Parents who disagreed about making a baby, parents who were complacent about the process, and parents who never had the chance to plan (the so-called “oops” pregnancy) were much more likely to struggle post-birth.
When I gave birth to my daughter, we weren’t looking to fix our marriage with a baby. We weren’t on two different pages—one of us baby-hungry and the other just going along for the ride. We (yes, both of us) wanted to be parents, which left us both open to falling in love; this time that all-consuming love you have for your child. And while we loved (and still love) each other, when we looked at the little bundle placed in my arms in the delivery room, we were both hopelessly, totally gone. We love each other as two best friends who have shared passion and triumph. We found our other halves, and we are fulfilled. And we love our daughter, too. Fiercely. And in ways that we can’t love each other. It’s partly because we created her—although I firmly believe that parents who adopt have as strong a claim to the love of a child as we do. It’s also because we chose her. We actively made a decision to become parents. My husband and I became parents because we want to give everything we have to our daughter, and the reward will be watching her walk down a graduation aisle, get married have children of her own. When she makes a mistake or lets us down, it doesn’t decrease the love, it makes us work harder. Together we fell in love and made a child. Together, we fell in love with that child. As my husband says, “it’s just a different kind of love completely.” He calls how he feels about our daughter a complete attachment, a bond that he never saw coming and yet can’t imagine being without. He picked me (well, he asked me out!), he dated me, and he slowly fell in love with me, but he loved our daughter from the second she came screeching into the world. So when my 1-year-old works her way into my lap and asks, “Do you love me the best Mama?” I wrap my arms around her and reassure her, “Yup, Mommy loves you more than anything else in the whole wide world.”
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