I have been reading baby blogs and lately I have been disturbed by a trend that I have been seeing. It seems to me that every one is looking for the perfect combo to being SUPERMOM! and in order to do so they have to create SUPERBABY! Able to speak in full sentences at 3 months and leaping block buildings in single bounds by 10 months.
Don't get me wrong.... I am the first one to start bragging on my baby. Five minutes alone with me and your eyes are glazed and there is drool at the corner of your mouth as I tell you all of the things that my little one has done. And yes, in my eyes my daughter is the most beautiful truly perfect child on the face of the earth. But am I the only mom out there that wants to pause time and enjoy what I have for a moment, rather than wish it away or worse yet work hard to train it away. I read about all of the various different techniques that have been found to improve cognitive ability in your infant and I am astounded. Of course you have to understand that I started out behind because I didn't play music and books on tape to my child while she was in utero. So my child already behind is only getting further and further behind due to her limited mommy. I feel as if I am inflicting upon my child some gross injustice because the board books that I have chosen to read are more for our enjoyment than for their ability to further her education. She is five months old for crying out loud, hardly the age at which I need to start instilling deep-seated anxiety about climbing the ladder of success.
As to being super mom I am just trying sometimes to keep it all together enough to wear all the hats that I have right now. Being super anything right now is a bit of a stretch, let's try for good. I read the other day as a mother wrote about her ability to be able to tell what her child's cries meant by the time she was 2 and a half months old. I was stricken. I don't know if I can interpret A's cries. Shouldn't I as a good mother be able to do that, more importantly shouldn't I know if I can do that. I stopped and thought about it for a minute and then I realized that it is really hard to have to interpret something that you almost never hear. A very rarely cries... and when she does it is because 1. she is feeling under the weather or 2. she is over tired. I am lucky in that I did not have a colicky child. Very Very rarely has my child ever cried. That is not to say that she doesn't communicate. She has this squeal when she wants something that is really hard to ignore, and she also has this holler that tells you she is starting to get frustrated, and this guttural groan/grunt that makes her sound like she is going to explode. She also fusses when she wants attention and can't have it ( read dinner time every night!) So I guess that I can interpret what her cries mean when I hear them because you can be certain that if there is crying that mom has already been working to fix the world and it is something that I cannot fix right away such as teething pain or gas pain... but you can bet that the Tylenol or the Mylacon have already been given and we're just waiting for it to work.
I guess that what I have come to terms with more than anything by reading these blogs over the last few weeks is that I have become more confident in my own counsel as a mother. Yes I still like to look to the experts and my mom hears from me still constantly. But on a whole I have become more certain that I , me yeah me, I can answer my daughters needs. That isn't to say that I don't like to hear what other mothers are doing... but I have decided that my daughter is going to be fine despite the fact that I am not talking to her in only complex sentences with three-syllable words. We will leave the molding of type A personality children to others. I think that at five months she deserves the opportunity to be (gasp) a child. Her cognitive ability will not suffer too much for it. As a matter of fact... I am going to conduct my own study... allowing a child to be a child and using those teachable moments that come to us I am going to see if maybe just maybe I end up with a smart baby who is also happy.
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