For so long, motherhood frightened me. I had a difficult relationship with my own late mother?I never felt cemented to her in the unconditional way that I think a mother and daughter are supposed to be and I feared repeating this pattern. Did our disconnect happen in the formative years of my childhood" I wasn?t sure, but, at some point, my concern about the kind of mother I?d be was able to coexist with my desire to just be a mother.
And so, my husband and I tried to have a baby, a process that involved years of fertility treatments and finally adoption. While desperately hoping for the chance to love a child, I couldn?t stop worrying that there was something fundamentally broken about me that made me unbondable. Was that the fundamental reason why an embryo wouldn?t stick to my uterine lining in the first place" Perhaps nature was taking care of itself. How does a child actually form an attachment to a parent, I wondered. Is there an instantaneous and primal recognition of the unique relationship they share" Thankfully, my husband and I attended PRIDE (Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education), a mandatory 27 hours of training for future adoptive parents where Sofie Stergianis, a private-adoption practitioner and educator, helped demystify the attachment process and the factors that contribute to a healthy attachment.
?Bonding is described as falling in love,? says Stergianis, ?and attachment is learning to stay in love, which grows and g...