Love for a Second Child
Anna, my partner, and I recently announced the birth of our second child shortly after our son Kaspyan was born healthy into the loving embrace of his welcoming family. We are so enamored and borderline obsessed with our daughter that in the back of my mind, I had wondered whether the moment of his birth would be as profound for me as hers was. Would I shed tears of joy like I did the first time? Would I hold him with as much unconditional love as I had for her during those precious first moments and thereafter? I honestly did not know what to expect. It’s a facet of life I had never really thought about until we found out we were expecting again. My heart was bursting from seam to seam with adoration for my first born, Amalya, that I could not conceive of how my heart could even handle another child. I do have a hairy kid in the form of my male Beagle named Murphy, whom I love dearly, but I knew having a human child would be a whole new level (and it is), so there wasn’t the same mystery to me the first time around as there was with the expectation of a second child.
As his harmonious first cries echoed in our bathroom (Anna opted for a home, water birth) while our eyes gazed upon him for the first time, the reaction was just as life altering as it was the first time. Anna and I both rejoiced in tears of pure joy… a feeling I can count on one hand how many times I’ve experienced to that level. When I held him for the first time, something interesting happened. I looked into his eyes and I felt a strange mix of emotions bubbling inside. Of course I was ecstatic to be holding my healthy newborn son, but a part of me almost felt as though I was neglecting or in some way “cheating” on my love for my first-born daughter. A strange sense of guilt was brewing inside that I had not expected and was quite perplexed to be experiencing. It’s difficult to articulate accurately, but it was as if my heart and soul were in a temporary confused state of trying to adjust and come to grips with the profundity of what had just happened. I was moving from “how in the world is it going to be possible to love another child this much? Will my heart explode?” to “This is how…”
With Amalya it was instantaneous. I held her for the first time and looked into her eyes and the flame of deep parental love had ignited, bursting my heart ablaze. But with Kaspyan, it was more of a slow burn for the first few days. The flame was lit of course, but it’s as if my inner soul was saying, “OK, we read you loud and clear, just give us a minute to make some room in here!” Anna, Amalya, and I had such a great camaraderie and chemistry together, what would this new little stranger do to that balance? We will soon find out, and I suspect we will be learning to adjust to that for many years to come.
As hours turned to days, and days to weeks and now at one month since he was born, I have been amazed at how exponentially fast my heart has expanded to accommodate the love for my second child. I finally have my answer. The capacity for love is not finite, but rather infinite in its capability. My heart’s capacity to love unconditionally literally increased to accommodate my second child, whom I am now thoroughly obsessed with on a level I never even thought possible. I can’t wait to see him, give a ton of snuggles and watch him discover the world. And when he wakes up at night, despite my weary, tired eyes, I smile from ear to ear and tend to him with excitement because…well, Love. It really is an incredible feeling to experience!
The lesson is that this concept of Love, whether it’s parental, romantic, or platonic, knows no bounds. But more importantly, I think it’s the capability of receiving that love that can help open those gates. The more I postulated about it, the more I realized that maybe it was I that needed to prepare myself for receiving the love from my second child. I am still getting used to Amalya running up to me, hugging my leg saying, “I love you, Papa!” It’s so sweet and makes my heart skip a beat every time, so maybe I’m still adjusting to all this? While I won’t go into the details here, I will say that my home life growing up was not so gilded in declarations of adoration, quite the opposite actually. So, this new life of mine I have created, as lovely and loving as it is, remains a foreign land that I’m still getting used to, so adjusting to it is a natural process, I suppose.
Love can be such an enigmatic subject to think about, much less write about, but this parental love capacity is something that had been bouncing around in my mind for months, that I thought I’d see what else was out there.
Dr. Ellen Weber wrote a blog post in Psychology Today about love and favoritism of children when parenting. Her conclusion is that parents my favor certain children during various stages of their development. For instance, one parent may love the infancy stage while another may only prefer the toddler years, and so on. So, it can flip flop. While I have yet to figure out all of that yet, I can see how certain stages might appeal to certain aspects of a particular parent’s personality. That being said, I think having an equal unconditional love baseline for all your children is important. Whether or not you like or prefer a certain stage they’re in should not affect the overall love, at least I’m pretty sure it won’t with me.
Dr. Gayle Peterson writes in her blog about how you won’t really love your kids equally because your kids will all be different and will require their own unique brand of love from each parent. While I think that’s true to some extent, there’s still that baseline foundation of unconditional, parental love that should blanket your whole brood, however many there are. The kind of love that wants to protect them, provide for them, comfort them and prepare them for the trials and tribulations of life.
I leave you with this wisdom from an article about the Dalai Lama’s insight into parenting:
“A child cannot survive without the care of others; love is its most important nourishment. The allaying of the child’s many fears and the healthy development of its self-confidence depend directly upon love.”
Well said. As a Childcare Specialist i see many parents struggle with how they can love each of their children equally. It is a silent guilt that parents experience within themselves of showing favoritism to one child over the other. I don’t think that any parent want to love one child more than the other, but a post like this one can bring awareness on the issue.
Many thanks Henriette! Yes, part of the reason I wrote this was because I had never really heard anyone talk about this subject, but I’m certain I’m not the only one thinking or feeling these things, so I thought I’d put it out there. Thank you for reading 🙂