Milestones

Talk of milestones starts early. I visited my daughter's pediatrician almost every month in the first year of her life, and we always discussed milestones. "Is she tracking an object? Rolling over? Crawling? Does she have two words?" and some were more complex. "Does she have a sense of humor? (how can you assess this from someone who can't talk?) and "does she imitate you around the house?" (when she starts barking orders and rubbing her temples I'll let you know, doc!) It's all about meeting milestones. And especially in that first year, where a problem can appear only as a nuance, when new parents don't know what normal is and isn't -- there is an immediate pressure to be sure your kid is making the grade. My husband and I had bought an obscure book about parenting that listed gross and fine motor skills expected each month in a confusing grid not unlike an excel spreadsheet. We would read a month ahead and grow excited about what was to come, but also, to ensure that our kid was keeping up.

But milestones are not only reserved for infants. It's a bar mitzvah, a graduation, a first time behind the wheel. These moments are just as large as the ones we watch in our babies, and just as easily analyzed and obsessed over. The details, the disappointments, the pressure can all but erode the experience. At my bat mitzvah, the boy I liked danced all night with my best friend. It rained the whole day of my college graduation. I failed my drivers test three times. In the moment, it was hard to see what I had achieved once it was all over.

And let's not forget relationship milestones. Did you sleep together? Meet the parents? Take a vacation together? Talk marriage? Sometimes, these milestones happen seamlessly, without the "but what does this mean?" moment. Other times, defense mechanisms kick in. A break, not a break-up. Engagement ultimatums. Tear filled arguments and trial separations. And even when it all ends with forever, what does the avoidance and acceleration of milestones do to the story of us?

Anna Quindlen changed my life in one very specific way. She wrote an incredible essay "On Being a Mom". I have copied it below. It is easily transferrable to life in general, kids or no kids. It's about living in the moment, a manner of existing that I never before embraced. And while I still struggle with thinking too far ahead, I pause every day to notice the appreciate the things I have, right now, even when those things arrive late, only after a lot of resistance, or in a totally unexpected way.
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On Being Mom

by Anna Quindlen

If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the blackbutton eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin. ALL MY BABIES are gone now.

I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.

Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete.

Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations -- what they taught me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit- up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.

Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk,too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons.

What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.\n",1]
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.

It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were...