My T says it's a 3 step cycle - you come together, there's a rupture, you repair it, and the cycle begins again. Per Melanie Klein, I think. But step 1 & 3 are kind of the same, the state is one of trust, so really it's a binary system: close/apart; approach/retreat; rupture/repair. This was how it was supposed to work - with each cycle, mother and baby understood each other better. But as mykidsarecool said today, some mothers stopped at a rupture point - stopped attaching to us, stopped connecting to us, stopped talking to us, stopped relating to us. Stopped looking at us, stopped bathing us, stopped feeding us, never played with us to begin with, so that wasn't a loss. Let someone else do all that stuff.

This is a good pattern now, what you have. It's real. It's called getting to know. The good and bad work like Velcro to hook you into each other.