on babies growing and sadness

my kid turned one and I have thoughts

Yesterday, I was telling a friend that I feel my son’s first birthday more acutely than I have felt any of my own birthdays so far. The milestones have been rolling in lately, and he’s learning to clap, climb, blow bubbles through a straw, and progressing toward walking in what has felt like a landslide of development.

All of a sudden, I’m drowning in moments of “oh my god, he’s a human. Like, a real human.”

Of course he’s a human, right? But the realization is hitting me as he continues to display new forms of autonomy. As he continues to show me that he has his own personality and his own inclinations and his own mind.

He was, at one point, an extension of me. No longer.

The other day, the teenagers working at a drive thru window asked Ryan what plans he had for the weekend. He told them his son was turning one, and we were having a party.

One of them says, “oh fun!” The other says, “it must be kinda sad, too?”

Ryan replied, “No, it’s happy.”

It is common to express sadness when babies start to show signs of growing up. I’m not trying to tell anyone their emotional reaction to parenting is wrong, and sadness is certainly present with parents at various times through a child’s upbringing. This is normal and human.

It does make me a bit sad, however, that so often our first reaction to other people’s babies growing up is attempting to connect over the sadness of it. Of course, it’s a complicated sadness, more like nostalgia, that is mixed with happiness over the child’s continued growth and development.

But it does make me wonder if we don’t, as a society, value the cuteness of babies over the rambunctiousness of toddlers or the defiance of teenagers.

Is it because they’re easier to manage? In some ways, I’m sure, but it certainly can’t be said that raising a baby is easy.

Is it because, as babies, we don’t have to deal with all the ways they’re not exactly like us (or the ways that–as we pay for our raising–they are exactly like us)?

Now, I say all of this having not raised a toddler or young child or teenager myself, so take it all with a grain of salt, and ignore it if you find my musings insufferably uninformed.

Downhill from Here: The Slant Book (1910)

But I have been a child and a teenager. And I have been around lots of children and teenagers.

So yes, it makes me sad that a teenager herself would find it sad that a baby is growing up to be closer to what she is.

And I can’t help but wonder if the onslaught of “are you going to have more babies?” when a child turns one is related to all of this somehow. Like the cuteness of more babies is a buffer from the difficulties of raising older children.

Yes, babies are cute and precious and chubby and delightful. Of course they are. And yes, we’re evolutionarily wired to believe them to be so because of their vulnerability and heightened need for protection.

But wow, children of all ages are magical.

This weekend, I watched a three-year-old fling herself with reckless abandon at the entrance of a bounce house, consumed in a full-body cackle as she stood to do it over and over again. I watched a ten-year-old sit with my son, carefully giving him tiny bits of hamburger and tomato and constant encouragement.

I have been floored by the spiritual wisdom of 12-year-olds and the spunky insights of 9-year-olds. I’ve stood in shocked excitement as I’ve watched a 15-year-old pick up the skills of an ancient craft in no time flat. I’ve been touched by the quiet thoughtfulness of a 17-year-old, caught in perhaps the most in-between period of all human life.

At least for myself, when I’m interacting with parents of small babies who are growing and developing, I try to lead with celebration rather than sadness. I try to lead with affirmations of the amazing job the parents are doing, not insinuating that the days for which they will always be unceasingly nostalgic are coming to a close.

I know I will feel sadness and nostalgia for this time and for the past year. But I hope that, more than missing a time when my son was a non-speaking extension of me, I will cherish the times when he is a unique, magical, and yes, challenging, human of his own.

Because parenthood isn’t just having babies, is it? It’s nourishing those babies at the beginning of their lives and shepherding them through as much of the rest of it as we are blessed to be a part of.

I told my friend yesterday that the previous year has felt like a taproot, growing strong and firmly rooting itself under the soil. But now, having celebrated my son’s first birthday, he and I are no longer part of the same taproot, but two stalks growing separately out of it.

We’re still joined in the same source, the same root. But we are our own people. And we will continue to grow as our own people, knowing that the firmness of that root keeps us connected, right at the source.