My Useless Fixation on Baby Milestones
Keeping up with the Joneses' baby only stresses me out, but I can't stop
Milestones were a lot of fun when I was pregnant. Every time I’d enter a new week, I’d rush to read the subsection in my Mayo Clinic guide that explained what the embryo, and later, the fetus was doing. Then I’d go online and open every email from every pregnancy website comparing my baby to pieces of fruit.
I had no way of knowing if what the Mayo book or too-cute-by-half websites said was actually happening apart from the few and far between ultrasounds that are standard in prenatal care, but it was fun to imagine that the fetus was doing cool things for the first time like huffing their own pee via the amniotic fluid and putting their webby little proto-hands into their weird little mouths. After the pregnancy had proceeded into the second trimester, the only time I felt anxious about the baby’s well-being was after I was introduced to the concept of “kick counting,” and since mine was the type of fetus that spent month six onward absolutely kicking the shit out of me 24 hours a day, I barely worried about even that.
Milestones as spelled out by websites and newsletters and charts are less fun now that the baby is physically here.
That’s because, unlike all that time she spent tucked away and out of sight, a mango-sized aquatic alien hanging out inside my body, I can now read about what my baby is “supposed to” be doing and compare that with what she’s actually doing, and then the flock of flying anxiety monkeys can perch in the part of my brain devoted to observing and appreciating the growth of my child.
For example: the dreadful website What to Expect When You’re Expecting says that now that my daughter is seven months old, she is rolling back and forth, sometimes when she’s sleeping! She’s sleeping 11 hours per night and might even be crawling and clapping her hands! Maybe she’s trying to stand!
Nope.
My daughter is seven months old now. She can use a spoon to feed herself, although her aim isn’t always great; the other day she distributed a heaping spoonful of prunes onto her forehead. She does something that sounds like an imitation of singing. She babbles constantly and looks in the direction of the person or thing I’m mentioning when I say “Daddy,” “Luca” (the dog), or “Kitty.” She grabs for everything, especially hair.
However, she’s only successfully rolled over unassisted a handful of times; otherwise, she has little interest in it. She can sit up without support, but she can’t get there on her own. She tries to crawl, but doesn’t understand that she needs to use her arms, so she ends up using her knees to kind of scoot her face along the ground like it’s a push mower, and she doesn’t move forward as much as rotate around a single point. She is not sleeping through the night. Every time I’ve tried to give her infant formula, she’s looked at me like an Agatha Christie character who realizes after ingesting a laced cup of tea that they’ve been poisoned– poisoned! She doesn’t clap, but she does hit. We are nowhere near standing.
Her doctor says she’s fine. Most of the milestone literature specifically says that babies develop differently. My friends who are mothers have told me to “ignore” milestone guidelines unless she’s way, way, way behind, and I know that I should. My logical brain nods along with these voices. Yes, yes, of course every baby is different. Yes, ok, I understand that there’s a huge range of development that is considered “normal.” It could not be more clear to me what the doctor says; she writes it down in a one-page summary that she sends home with parents, one that looks like an elementary school report card designed to keep people like me from cherry picking moments from perfectly normal doctor visits and spiraling into anxiety. I know this. I could not know this any harder.
But my totally off her rocker parent brain does not care about logic, or reassurances, or the doctor writing “Juniper is doing great!” with a hand-drawn smiley face after it. Parent brain can only whisper worries about why she doesn’t care about rolling over or whether her babbling is the “right” kind of babbling.
We have one of those monthly milestone mats parents use as a photo backdrop. When friends and Instagram mutuals post photos of their own similarly-aged babies, I hone in on the ways that the other babies are bigger or more mobile, and how my daughter may be falling behind and how, by extension, this is my fault. When I read parenting message boards, they are full of people bragging about how advanced their babies are. When I hear that a baby that is even younger than mine is sleeping through the night or crawling or rolling from back to front and front to back with abandon, I wonder what I’m doing wrong.
In the spirit of transparency, here are some of the made-up ways I’ve tried to blame myself for problems that exist only in my imagination:
I have bad milk
I ate too much soft serve ice cream/frozen bananas/cheese while pregnant
I’m not happy enough
I am too much of a pushover
I hold her too much
I hold her too little
I need to be more of a hardass about sleep
I’m too old
I drank water from too many plastic bottles
The air in Los Angeles is poisoning her and I should never have moved here (note: if I had never moved to Los Angeles I would have never met my husband and therefore she would not exist. Told you these didn’t make sense.)
I know I’m probably not doing anything wrong. I know these anxieties are fundamentally silly. But mom guilt does not listen to reason; mom guilt does whatever the fuck she wants.
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