Attachment

(Photo-credit: Andrew Prescod, Flickr)

I was reading a glossy magazine (something I don’t do very often) while waiting to get my eyebrows threaded (painful experience) at the beauty salon last week and I learnt something new. To be more precise, I learnt a new term for a  particular parenting approach. It was a revelatory moment for me because I had in fact used this style of parenting without knowing it. My son is four now so it’s been a while since he was a baby, but the article brought back a flood of memories.

The article was about a young celebrity mother who was sharing her bed with her baby daughter and feeding her on demand . This was decribed as, ‘the attachment method’, and the various benefits of this were divulged sprinkled with lots of glamourous photographs of the celebrity mum looking nothing like a woman who has just given birth. She lay in her plush bedroom cradling her new-born as if she had just stepped out of a five star beauty salon; perfect make-up, manicured nails, and not a line of worry or exhaustion visible on her face. I looked nothing like that when I gave birth.

I walked around in a zombie-like state for months after my son was born as a result of post-natal depression and a very difficult birth. I cried most of the time and only left our flat when I had to take my son for his weekly weigh-ins. I had one of those baby carriers and my son was attached to me all day and all night.  I did the housework, ate,  slept and went to the toilet with his body against mine. The midwives, health workers and family frowned in disapproval when I told them this.

My husband moved into the spare room while I perfected a breastfeeding posture which allowed my son to have milk whenever he pleased. He only had to part his lips and the milk would flow into his tiny mouth. The sense of attachment was so strong that for those occasions when I had to remove the baby carrier, I felt the absence of him so strongly like there was only half of me left.

So the moral of this tale is that for a long time I was made to feel bad for an approach that seemed so natural to me, an approach which is now being praised and glorified among celebrities.