What if bonding with my baby still hasn't clicked?

The honest version

She's nearly six months. Her mother is head over heels. I definitely love her, and I'm fairly relaxed about not seeing her — and I don't understand that, because she reaches for me every morning.

And a blunter one from earlier: when does it click that I have a daughter? I love her, but half the time I say it to trick my own mind. I know I do love her.

Bonding can take time

The feeling often follows the doing rather than preceding it, and the doing accumulates at different rates for different people.

The parent who carried her and feeds her has had a head start measured in months and hormones. That isn't a moral difference and it isn't a sign of how either of you will be as a parent in five years. But it does mean that standing next to someone who was besotted from the first hour is a terrible place to assess yourself from.

For us it wasn't gradual and then complete. It was a specific moment — kissing the top of her head — after which things started connecting that hadn't before. Before that, honestly, not much.

Which is worth saying for two reasons. It can arrive suddenly and late, so a flat six months is not a forecast. And it arrived during ordinary contact rather than during an attempt to feel something.

What slowly helped it move

It came from her mother, and it reframed the whole thing: you can do less, but be present and actually want to be there, rather than treating it as a chore.

That landed because the instinct when you do not feel it is to compensate with volume — more hours, more tasks, trying harder. But hours done only as a duty do not build much. One hour where you are genuinely present can do more than three spent working through a list. That change in perspective helped enormously. I started seeing Ari as a little person, rather than another task to finish before someone took over and I could rest.