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Your baby will be unique, different from anyone else's baby and different from any other baby you have had, or will have; just as, whatever is essential and constant in your own personality, you are bound to be a slightly different mother to each of your children.
Relationships grow through the ability of both parties to experience and to adjust to each other's natures. Just as your baby needs to have food and comfort and space to grow, he needs to have the security of a loving relationship within which he can express himself, be known and learn to know himself and the whole range of his own feelings. Through your response to his physical and emotional needs he learns to know you, to build up some trust in a caring, helping person, and through your appropriate interpretation of his messages he learns to know himself also.
For instance, if he has a pain in his tummy, he won't have the faintest idea of what this is, he won't know how or what to ask for to put it right. And as his mother, in the beginning, you sometimes won't have the faintest idea either. You may interpret his cries, his writhings, as expressions of hunger, and you may then feed him. You