  Lisa's and Baby Joe's birth inspired me to write an article, an ammendment of sorts, as an addition to an earlier article I'd titled First-time Mother Shock. Here is an exerpt: Before the arrival of my daughter, my biggest fear was that I would not bond as closely with her as I had with my son at his birth. Nothing could have been more wrong. I bonded violently to her. Now comfortable with the mantle of motherhood, I gave in to every protective and doting urge, I held her and comforted her from the moment she emerged from my body. The difficulty, instead, was re-bonding with my son after bonding to my daughter. Nothing has ever looked so strange as my son after my daughter’s birth.
In my mind, he was still my baby, but seeing him after having a baby juxtaposed paradoxically the fact that he was gigantic with my memory of him as so small! The first time I changed his diaper after returning home, I stared for a few minutes at his foot thinking, my God, what a big foot! Later I nudged my husband and said, have you seen Aidan’s feet? And my husband confessed he was having as much difficulty conceiving of Aidan in his new identity as I was. Compared to the fantastic bonding emotions I was feeling toward my daughter, my feelings for my son were a little pale. It frightened me, as nothing in parenting literature had prepared me for such an experience. What saved me was the presence of my parents, especially my dad whom Aidan adores, and who was able to lavish his every attention on Aidan so that he didn’t even notice mama’s estrangement. It gave me a few days to examine my feelings, and to be alone with Ella. I was able to localize my emotions to a few underlying feelings: · I realized I was so protective of Ella, that even my time staring into her eyes felt threatened when Aidan needed my attention. · I realized the difficulty I had seeing Aidan in his freakishly big state was based on the fact that now he was the big brother, and Ella was my baby.
· I realized that Aidan’s natural curiosity I was struggling to encourage so he could bond with his sister was causing anxiety for me because I was so afraid he would hurt her. Taking time to isolate these realizations was the best thing I did, because then I was free to let myself off the guilty hook for experiencing natural instinctive emotions regarding my new baby. It shined light on the options available to me to reacquaint myself with my son. I was able to set goals for my reactions to situations, which released the anxiety I felt, and prevented me from setting Aidan up to have problems with his sister as he would have inevitably sensed my anxiety and connected it to the presence of his sister.
The other thing I did that helped us was discuss every emotion openly with my husband. He never made me feel guilty for them, he only offered suggestions for what he could do to help. After my parents left, around Ella’s fifth day out, the best thing John did to help was spend time with Aidan. He also was better equipped to spend time with the two children together. He would read with them both in his lap or cuddle with the two of them at once. This let me retreat to the corner and watch my new family together, which turned out to be the best thing for my brain: experiencing them as a unit, without the pressure to interact.
All the while, I worked to re-bond with Aidan just as I would advise another mother bond with her first time infant in the event of low bonding hormones. I gave him lots of skin on skin contact, through massaging him or cuddling with him, I smelled him a lot, I gazed into his beautiful eyes and smiled.
I told him I loved him and assured him that was my number one guy. Either my efforts or time, and likely a combination of the two together, resolved the problems I had adjusting to mothering my two kids. Within the first two weeks, Aidan had fallen in love with his sister right along with us, and just as I had discovered how much I loved watching my husband be a father when Aidan was born, I fell in love with Aidan all over again, too, this time as my child and a big brother. 
