There's nothing quite like maternal instinct. You know your baby the minute you see her, and maybe even before she arrives you've dreamed of her and know what she will look like. And the cry! You know her cry the first time you hear it. Or so I was told. Except that my entire pregnancy I dreamed deeply and intuitively of a boy and had a girl, and after labor I couldn't even pick out my own baby in the nursery, much less identify her cry.

A close childhood friend just emailed me a pic of her newbie and I had a flashback to my first day with my own babe in hospital. My Perfectly Natural Childbirth plan did not go according to plan, or anywhere  close to it. Dire warnings from my Perfectly Natural NYC unbermommy childbirth class had cautioned against putting new babes in nurseries for fear of disturbing the mother-child bond, but I handed my newborn over without the slightest compunction. The baby nurse was an incredible genius with infants and I was not. This lady swaddled my Crabtot to within an inch of her life and whisked her to a place where she would be safe, warm, and fed EVIL FORMULA while her drug-addled post-C-section mother clicked on that morphine drip like nobody's business. It was fantastic!

I had been told I'd want to get up and walk out of that hospital within mere hours of my natural childbirth. Instead I asked my insurance for a fourth night and whooped with joy when I got it. I'd dreamed that my baby would slip out of me "like a bar of soap." I actually dreamed those words (as well as "like a sardine"). But bar of soap? Not so much. Maybe I got the dream wrong. Maybe my dream oracle voice said like a barge through a moat, and I just heard it wrong...?

Anyhoo.

The arrival of Crabtot was, in other words, not what I expected. But the moment when it all became clear to me—that I knew nothing, had no head start on motherhood, and would have to learn all of it—was when I cooed at the wrong baby in the nursery. "Hi, my baby," I said to a precious little dark-capped bundle.
"Actually, that's not your baby," the neonatal lady said.
"Oh!" I laughed. Must be all that morphine! I moved on down the line and spotted my child. "There she is!"
"Nope, Baby Bernstein," the nurse replied, referring to the baby of a friend who so happened to be having her baby (a boy) in the same place and on the same day as me.

I finally did find my baby, third time lucky, but you can be sure I did not simply follow the sound of her cry with that fierce conviction that is maternal instinct. And maybe you think I'm seriously kooky for not knowing what the heck I was seeing or hearing when it came to my own child, but come on: it's like asking someone to recognize their innards in a lineup! Okay, maybe a babe isn't quite so anonymous as one's internal organs, but I still think the comparison stands, because to me babies come in types, and while mine conformed to the dark-capped almond-eyed type I predicted, I still didn't know her a whole bunch better than I'd know my own pancreas if I met it.

So, yes, I was one of those who thought she'd be "a natural mother," whatever that is. In that first moment I'd expected recognition and instead I was in the presence of newness: a mysterious, entirely  enthralling newness, but someone as foreign to me as I was now to myself in my new role.

Now that the early days are behind me and I'm a total mommy pro and know all there is to know about being amazing and perfect at motherhood in every conceivable way, I keep myself in check by remembering Crabtot's first couple of days. Sometimes I just laugh and see that initial confusion as my entirely sucking at new mommyhood, slapstick-style. Other times it seems less to do with me and more to do with the idea that shared genes and parental love aside, children are born their own people, which makes them harder to recognize as belonging to you (an idea, I might add, that doesn't belong to me). In this way, my child is not mine; she just passed through me. And, thanks to her hospital ID bracelet, I get to keep her for a bit.

And you? Instant natural mommy or...?