My son would not take a bottle. This was a big surprise, since my two daughters had easily switched between the bottle and the breast. I started my first baby on bottles of pumped breastmilk at a few days old, too tired to care about the hospital’s warnings about nipple confusion. I was scared to co-sleep, pumping was easy for me, and my husband was happy to help with night feedings, so it seemed to be a logical decision. I was also relieved that my daughter had two ways to eat, saying, “If something happened to me, at least she knows how to take a bottle.”  With my second daughter, born 18 months later, we did the same thing.

But after the birth of my son, when my girls were two and three, it suddenly seemed possible for me to co-sleep and nurse all night. I was more comfortable with the idea of a baby in my bed, and I didn’t want his crying at night to wake the girls. Since there was no need for my husband to pitch in with feedings, our first attempt at a bottle was at three months, before I went back to work. My baby refused it, loudly, and decidedly, no matter how many ways we tried. So he remained with me at all times aside from my 10 hours a week of work (during which he ate nothing), since he did, after all, have to eat.

With my son, I also didn’t feel much of an urge for alone time. This was new for me, since my two girls had been introduced to babysitters early on. With my first daughter, I would get a sitter for a couple of hours a week just to walk to the coffee shop or get a haircut.  After the birth of my second daughter, I felt entirely overwhelmed caring for two children under two years old and felt that a sitter for a few hours a week saved my sanity. And soon after the birth of each of my girls, my husband and I prided ourselves on prioritizing our couple time, and resuming at least monthly date nights.

But although my co-sleeping, constantly nursing son was more demanding than his sisters had been, I no longer felt the same pull to go on walks alone or date nights. On the mornings when the girls were in preschool, I would put my son in the Moby Wrap and walk around the neighborhood or the mall. He would smile and look up at me from his place on my chest, and take his naps against my body. He came with me everywhere, seeing his first movie in a theater at a week old. Between the wrap, breastfeeding on demand, and co-sleeping, I spent almost every minute of my day with him.

My son’s refusal to take a bottle took away any desire I had to take a break from him, even after he grew older, sitting up and crawling. The lack of choice I perceived in the matter felt liberating rather than constricting. Worrying that he would not become independent was moot, because his need to eat trumped that concern. Nobody else could feed him, or even comfort him much of the time. I was no longer replaceable, by the bottle, or my husband, or a sitter. I had become everything to my baby, and it didn’t scare me.

I asked myself frequently why I had originally acted differently toward my son, missing his window to learn how to take a bottle. Was it that he was my third? My last? A boy? It was all three, but strangely enough, the gender of my baby seemed to matter to me most. My son, although he looks like his sisters, was very much a typical little boy even as an infant, from his stronger features to the fact that he didn’t have much cautiousness or sensitivity about him. As a toddler, he has his father’s big, confident smile.

My girls, though, reminded me of myself: the first observant and sensitive like me, and the second my spitting image, so much that my delivery nurse’s first words upon her birth were “Looks like Mama!” Their resemblance to me triggered my own fear and anxiety. I was terrified that my relationship with my daughters would replicate my own with my mother, a close and volatile bond between an only child and an anxious parent.

My mother and I were each other’s main confidante, the mother-daughter relationship taken to a hothouse extreme. It had been clearly apparent to me as a child that my mother’s life and happiness were dependent on mine, as her mother’s had been on her, and I fruitlessly yearned for siblings or other family members to appear and let the pressure out of our exclusive relationship.

I relied on my mother for companionship, connection, even for a sense of reality.  If I did not tell her about an experience, it felt as if it hadn’t happened at all.  It took me until I was in grade school to realize that she did not know what went on at school if I didn’t tell her. In my teens and twenties, our relationship became dramatic and conflictual. I had a deep desire to separate and lead my own life, but had no practice at doing so, and so I pulled away and came right back, over and over again.

Becoming a mother to two little girls brought up all of these feelings from my own childhood. My goal was to avoid encumbering my own daughters with a too-tight mother-daughter bond. So, although I loved my girls fiercely and worked part-time to spend most of my days with them, I held myself back from being their whole world, even when they were so young that this would have been healthy and normal. My retinue of sitters, my focus on not losing my pre-baby identity, and even my careful division of feedings between myself and my husband were all done with the half-conscious intent of putting some emotional space between myself and my daughters.

I was relieved when I saw my girls bonding to other caregivers, and not depending exclusively on me. I didn’t want them to feel, as I did when growing up, that their relationship with their mother was the central, even the only, one in their lives. It was easier to think of myself as replaceable than to burden them with the full, potentially overpowering, weight of my love. Every sign of my daughters’ independence was a moment of pride for me, and a sign that they would grow up autonomous and free.

But my son was and remains a happy, loud little guy who never reminded me in the slightest of myself, and therefore did not trigger my anxieties I didn’t worry about co-sleeping in his babyhood priming him to be unable to ever sleep alone, his dislike of babysitters meaning he wouldn’t be able to separate from me as an older child, or his hourly breastfeeding meaning he would starve if I died. My son, by refusing his bottle, taught me to delight in the fleeting months of being the center of a baby’s world.

My full acceptance of my irreplaceability to my son carried over into my relationship with my daughters. My daughters were happy and sociable babies who seemed to enjoy their time with other caregivers and developed lasting relationships with them. But I wish I had been able to fully embrace motherhood earlier, without the fear of merging too completely.

My children all needed and wanted to depend on me, and still will depend on me for quite a while. I am now trying to trust that I can be essential to all my children in their early years without snuffing out their later independence. For me and my children, my full surrender to motherhood turned out to be both possible and necessary.

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About the Author

Samantha Rodman

Dr. Samantha Rodman is a clinical psychologist and mom of three kids 5 and under. She blogs at about relationships, parenting, and psychology.