What happens when a mother feels nothing for her newborn? It should have been one of the happiest days of Zoe Hicks’s life. Her baby, Izzy, who had spent a month in special care after being born premature, was finally coming home. The whole family had gathered to celebrate; Zoe herself could not stop crying.
“Everyone assumed it was because I was so happy,” recalls Zoe, 29, from Evesham in Worcestershire. “But I just wanted to run back inside the hospital and leave her there. I didn’t want to take her home. I didn’t think I could ever love my baby.”
Zoe had had a trouble-free pregnancy and labour with her first daughter, Xara, born four years previously, but with Izzy it was a very different story.
