When I look at my daughter, my mind knows that it is courtesy of her that I went through the terribleness that is HG, but my emotions don't know that. Intellectually speaking I know that my body couldn't handle the hormones necessary to build her little body from scratch and therefore it rebelled against me. From the first moment I saw her, though, I couldn't connect that suffering with this squirming little bundle of beauty in my arms.
I always say that if babies weren't so darn cute, their parents would kill them. I'm not talking in general, I'm talking after weeks of no sleep, a colicky baby who just threw up everywhere and pooped through five sets of clothing in the past three hours. The only thing that saves babies in times like that is that they are so ridiculously lovable and cute.
It's the same thing here, in a way. I bonded with L.H. in a very limited fashion when she was in utero because I was simply trying to survive and she was making that quite difficult. But if I looked at her today and saw her as the cause of those eight long months of hardship, then how could I love her as much? How could I bond with her?
They say that women forget the pain of childbirth, and that's why they go on and have more. After all, if each woman only had one child then the human race would die out. HG is awfully difficult to forget and in many ways I don't want to forget how horrible it is so that I go into pregnancy the next time prepared for the worst. But if I was to look at my child and think to myself, gee, look what she did to me - then I would never consent to go through it again. She didn't ask to be grown inside me; we kind of did that one on our own. So as much as it's "her fault", she is blameless.
As much as I hate the disconnect and the fact that I couldn't really relate to her prenatally, in some ways it is good because it preserves a perfect, clean relationship between us and ensures that at some point in the future, a little brother or sister will join her.
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