Is It Normal To Feel Overwhelming Love For Your Baby? What New Parents Should Know
It’s 2:17 a.m. and I’m perched on our lumpy nursery glider, the one with a coffee stain on the right arm from an oat latte I spilled three weeks ago. My 8-week-old daughter is latched, her tiny fisted hand pressed against my ribs, and the amber salt lamp in the corner casts a soft gold over the crumbs of Goldfish my 4-year-old left on the side table yesterday. I’m not tired enough to sleep, not awake enough to scroll my phone, so I just stare at the soft fuzz along her ear. And then it hits: a wave so big it tightens my chest and makes my eyes burn. It’s not sadness. It’s not anxiety about the work emails piling up or the toddler’s dentist appointment the next day. It’s just love. Overwhelming, too-big-to-contain love. It scares me a little, every time.
A couple days before that 2 a.m. moment, I sat in the library’s weekly new parent coffee hour, listening to everyone trade stories: 4 a.m. cluster feeds, toddler tantrums over the wrong color cup, the way no one has folded fitted sheets in three months. No one mentioned this feeling. I almost opened my mouth, then closed it. What if everyone thinks I’m weird? What if it’s not normal? I went home and googled “why does loving my baby feel overwhelming” at 10 p.m. that night, got a bunch of thinkpieces about postpartum depression that didn’t fit my experience, so I closed the laptop and felt silly for asking.
I brought it up to my pediatrician at the 2-month checkup, twisting the strap of my diaper bag while the baby laid on the exam table kicking her feet. “This is probably stupid, but I keep getting these waves of love for her that are so big I can’t breathe,” I said. “Is that normal? Am I doing something wrong?” She laughed, not in a mean way—she’s a mom of three, with a dinosaur sticker chart taped to her wall—and said she still gets that feeling with her oldest, who’s 16. She explained that we hear so much about negative overwhelm after having a baby: the sleep deprivation, the stress, the postpartum mood changes we need to watch for. No one talks about how big the positive feelings can get. It’s just your brain’s attachment system working. All that oxytocin, the biological drive to keep your baby safe, doesn’t come with a volume knob. Sometimes it gets cranked all the way up. That’s not a problem, usually.
I brought it up at the next coffee hour, after another mom mentioned she sits outside her 2-year-old’s door after bedtime and cries sometimes because she loves him so much it hurts. I said me too. Half the room nodded. One first-time mom said she thought she was the only one, that she’d been hiding the feeling because she thought it meant she was over-attached or unbalanced. That’s the thing: we all thought we were alone. We post the cute photos and the tired, relatable rants online, but we don’t post these big, soft, scary feelings, because they feel wrong somehow.
I’ve found a few small, concrete things that help when the feeling feels too big, when it starts tipping into the what-if thoughts—you know the ones, where suddenly you’re imagining every bad thing that could ever happen to them, just because the love is so big you can’t imagine life without them. The first thing I do is a quick 3-part check: I name one thing I can feel right now (usually the warm weight of the baby against my chest, or her soft hair under my palm), one thing I can hear (her little snuffles, the fan in the window), one thing I can smell (that milky baby shampoo smell, or the lavender detergent on her sleeper). It takes 10 seconds, and it pulls me out of the spiral and back into the actual moment, instead of letting my brain run away with all the scary hypotheticals.
The second thing is I text one of two mom friends who get it. I don’t write a big long speech, just “just had a too-big love moment with the baby, felt weird, just checking in” and 9 times out of 10 they write back “me too, I had one an hour ago looking at my kid’s school picture.” Just knowing you’re not the only one takes the edge off faster than any google search.
It’s also good to know when it’s something to talk to a doctor about. If those big feelings are almost always tied to intrusive scary thoughts that won’t go away—if you’re avoiding holding your baby because you’re scared of what you’ll think, if you can’t sleep even when the baby is asleep because you can’t stop worrying, if it’s taking all your energy just to get through the day—that’s a sign it might be postpartum anxiety, which is really common and really treatable. There’s no shame in that, it just means you need a little extra support.
Last night, I had that wave again. I was holding her after a fussy spell where she wouldn’t stop crying, and she finally fell asleep on my chest, her breath hot against my neck. The feeling washed over me, big enough that my eyes got wet. I did the 3-part check: felt her heart beating against mine, heard the air conditioner humming down the hall, smelled her milky skin. I didn’t panic this time. I just sat there, until my husband woke up and asked if I wanted a glass of water.
Some nights it still feels too big. I still close my phone fast when I’ve been googling too much about weird new parent feelings. I still haven’t put it on my Instagram feed. But I don’t think it’s weird anymore. It’s just what it is: loving a tiny person who depends on you completely doesn’t fit in a little, neat box. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. And that’s normal.
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