CRAWLING TOWARDS LAST PLACE

I’m the Tonya Harding of crawling. I’m not proud of it. In fact, I hate myself for it. I promised myself I’d never be one of those Moms, but I also said I’d never date anyone longer than 2 years without getting engaged. 4 ½ years later, I learned never to proclaim “never” because some friend with a good memory will remind you that you’re doing exactly what you said you’d never do and then your credibility is shot.

Case in point, I said, “I never want to be a competitive Mom, checking my kid’s progress against other kids’…” But since I’ve never actually met a living, breathing Mom (or Dad for that matter) who isn’t competitive when it comes to their kid, it shouldn’t surprise me that I’m on the verge of tears looking at all these little Nancy Kerrigans crawling by my boy. I’m not unhappy for this herd of heads and butts cruising by my guy, I’m just sad for mine. He’s been trying for weeks now, up on all fours, a step, then another, then crawling…backwards. My son’s transmission is stuck in reverse and he can only scoot himself back until he gets his giant head stuck into a tiny space. While the other kids are one unified pack of asses in the air, playing together, my guy is perfectly content playing by himself, bashing a ladle into the ground, or sucking on his big toe like a finger. All his friends are moving forward, taking the next step toward a new milestone, and my guy isn’t even in neutral, he’s in reverse and he’s alone.

I find myself willing him to crawl at all possible times. Tummy time turns into “Tummy Hour”, me with a whistle around my neck coaching him through drills. Time spent in the car seat, stroller, or someone’s arms is restricted to only what’s necessary so as not to stunt his time working out. I rock him back and forth on all fours, giving him a push with an encouraging, “Craaaawl,” but he won’t budge. Finally, at last resort, I get down on all fours, my ass high in the air, my low rise jeans sliding low below my rise, and with one foot in front of the other, I show him how it’s done. But instead of my kid emulating my moves, I turn around to find my husband in the doorway, bordering on a full on pup tent at the site of me down on all fours, panting and crawling like some sort of infant replicating porn star. He suggests maybe we should “hit it” while the kid naps. This infuriates me.

“How can you be turned on when our son might be retarded? Don’t you love your son?” I scream. “His buddies aren’t going to play with him now that they can move and he can’t!”

But he remains un-phased and says, “The kid’ll crawl when he’s ready to crawl. It may not be when you’re ready for him to crawl, but he’ll crawl.” This infuriates me even more.

“You just don’t love him like I do,” I say.

But my MBA husband is suddenly some sort of Zen baby guru and tells me that while he used to think I was the sanest woman he’d ever known, this crawling thing has brought out my “Female Gene.” That’s husband for irrational.

Then I lose it. “I beg to differ. Irrational is asking to “hit it” in the midst of a fight. There will be no hitting it, not until my little boy crawls and my big boy apologizes for accusing me of being a crazy female just because I’m worried my kid’s life will be ruined because he’s the last to crawl.” Wait…

That is a little extreme. I know my kid is fine. I just don’t want him to be…Hmm. Why is this bothering me so much? Why do I care what the other kids are doing when I know my kid is moving along at his own pace, content where he is? Could it be? Could my husband be rig.. No, that’s impossible. If there’s one thing married women know it’s that husbands are never, ever….righ…Are they?

Rationally I know there’s a wide range of normal for kids. My guy got his first tooth at four months, others don’t see a tooth until much later. Some kids are walking by their first birthday, others are barely standing by the same time. They’re all normal; each on his or her own timetable. But it’s easier to remember that when your kid is the first to giggle, rollover, or talk, not when your kid is crawling towards last place, back of the pack.

The constant questions from strangers don’t help. When I was pregnant, I was able to dodge the onslaught of intrusive questions gracefully, without feeling obligated to tell every Tom, Dick, and In-Law how much baby weight I’d gained, if I wanted a boy or a girl, or even though my then unborn child was still unborn, would I be planning to have another. But for some reason, now that he’s here, the barrage of competitive questions and comments: “You know so and so’s kid was crawling at ... “, ”I bet the next time I see him, he’ll be ….”, “You know when my son was a baby….”, feel like judgments against my boy and judgments against me.

It’s not enough to have a happy, healthy baby, he also has to meet everyone else’s expectations. He has to crawl when the UPS man thinks he should, talk when his friends do, and be just like every other baby. Even worse, my concerns about him not crawling have made me into what I hate, an obsessed parent frustrated because my kid isn’t on my timetable.

In reality, knowing your kid is the only one in a group not to do something is terribly painful. At 9 months, my boy doesn’t know the difference. He’s not feeling crawling shame, worried the cool kids won’t like him, but I am. I know what it’s like to be left out, I know what it’s like not to feel like I can't keep up, I know what it’s like to feel like I just can’t move my life forward to the next age appropriate milestone. Every adult knows what it’s like to feel stuck, unable to get the transmission out of reverse and get out of the tiny space you’ve backed yourself into. So while I’m watching my kid rolling while the others are crawling, it’s really my pain I don’t want him to experience. I want to shield him from being left out, from being alone, from being “the one” who just can’t hang with the others. I want to shield him from being me.

There are those parents who are just hyper competitive about life, so they’re hyper competitive about their kids. They’re usually the ones who start every sentence with, “You know me, I’m just not a competitive person…” and then they say something really competitive. But for most parents, we’re making the best choices we can for our kids with the information we have, which is often very little. There’s a lot of guesswork and fear when it comes to our little ones and the only way we’ll know we made the right choices is to see our kids grow up well. Every time someone else does something different with their child, or every time a child surpasses another, it calls into question our choices as parents. The differences in parenting remind us that there’s no insurance guaranteeing our kids will be okay. All we really want as parents is for our kids to be okay.

Husbands are a lot of things, but “right” is an attribute I rarely want to give to mine. But right now, faced with the fact that I’ve claimed my child might have a life ruined simply because he’s the last of his buds to crawl, I have to admit, my husband just might be..is probably…is definitely right.

Let’s keep that part to ourselves. Once he finds out, he’s going to revisit the hitting it thing and quite frankly, I’m exhausted because the kid started crawling today. It happened just like that, just like my husband said, when he was ready. And while I’m so happy for him, I’m sad for me. In all my time willing this kid to crawl, I forgot to take into account that he’d be crawling; on the move, full mobility to destroy everything in his path. Gone are the days of toe sucking and ladle banging, he’s got stereos to take apart, screen doors to plow through, computer cords to chew. He’s even trying to stand. He’s moving toward the next milestone. My house is in shambles and I can’t take my eyes off him even to pee, but he’s on the move. He’s in motion. Now I can see that he’s always been moving forward, it’s me who was stuck in reverse.