Places I Did Not Know Existed
I did not know the developmental leaps existed. Then a book mapped them.
The baby is crying and I do not know why.
I used to be the kind of person who came home from somewhere and told you everything. Where I went. What the light was like. Whether the place was worth it. I liked being the one with the report.
Now I do not go anywhere. And I still have somewhere new to show you.
The places are called developmental leaps. I did not know they existed. No one told me. Then a friend handed me a book, and the book had a map.
A leap is a week, or a few of them, when her mind changes faster than her body can hold. The book calls them Wonder Weeks. Before a new skill arrives - before she rolls, before she reaches, before she learns that I am still here when I leave the room - the whole world goes strange to her. She does not have words for it. So she cries.
This is the hard place.
She clings. She wants to be held, and only held. She will not sleep. And the crying has no caption. I check the diaper. I check the clock. I check myself. There is nothing to fix, because nothing is broken. She is only growing, and growing is hard, and I cannot do it for her.
The not-knowing is the part that gets into my nervous system and stays.
I am a person who likes a plan. I set the day, I meet the day, I show you the result. A leap does not negotiate. It arrives on its own schedule and takes my schedule with it. For a while I thought I was failing. I was not failing. I was somewhere I did not have a map for.
The book is the map. It does not stop the crying. It tells me the crying is coming, and that it will end, and roughly when. That is almost everything. The hard days are the same hard days, but now they have edges. I can see the far side of them.
Because there is a far side. The leap passes, and the other places are calm.
She is usually an amazing child. I want that on the record, next to the rest. Motherhood, so far, has been fun. Between leaps she wakes wide awake and hangs out and smiles at me. We walk the neighborhood. We drive wherever we decide to go.
On the good days I feel like I am back. I have my life back. I have my time. I make plans. I take on a project. The oxytocin comes and I feel that I could do anything, and the strange part is that I still can.
I only have to read the time. To know when it is mine, and when it is not.
That is the thing the map taught me. The hard days are a place. They are not the whole country. I used to live in them as if they were permanent, as if the crying were the weather everywhere, forever. It is not. It is one region. We pass through it, and we come out the other side into the calm.
So I am not going anywhere.
But I can tell you what it is like here.