NEW MOM DIARY VOL. VI: THE ONE-YEAR MARK

By Jackie Weiss

Daphne passed her first birthday a few weeks back.  The milestone provides a good opportunity for some reflection, even if it is a bit arbitrary.   (As a milestone it carries far less importance than, for example, when she started sleeping through the night, or began eating solid food, or takes her first step -- that last one is still somewhere in the future.)  A year ago, time was moving much more slowly.  For one thing, each day was a round-the-clock process, punctuated, in roughly three-hour increments, by feedings and burpings.  We used to count Daphne's age in weeks.  Now that she has passed a year, there are forums where she is not even the youngest person in consideration anymore -- she now attends a weekly class for the 12- to 18-month-old cohort, having completed the 3- to 12-month curriculum.  And time has definitely sped up.  A year ago weeks felt like months, but now the months are flying by.

I've been back at work nearly a year, and can honestly say it feels like I never left.  Even my days of visiting the lactation room, which ended just about 6 months ago, feel like a distant memory.  Normalcy has returned, except that my life feels so much crazier now.  While a year ago I would have defined myself chiefly as a "new mother," today I would definitely first consider myself a "working mother."  I do not suffer from guilt about not staying home with Daphne -- my mother worked full-time while I was growing up, and so the arrangement feels natural to me.  I appreciate having a stimulating job and having a significant focus outside of the home (though I love it when anyone asks about Daphne during the work day.)  The hardest parts are saying goodbye to her before business trips, which I must take occasionally, and sometimes being too exhausted after particular days to be able to devote myself to her fully before bedtime.  Because I see Daphne only briefly in the morning, and for an hour or two before bedtime in the evenings, I treasure my weekends with her and shrink from any activities that keep me apart from her.  I look forward to the basics, like picking out her clothes, pushing her on the swing, feeding her dinner, and giving her a bath.  At the office I usually begin work by opening a digital picture of her on my computer screen, and flipping to it regularly throughout the day. 

One of the strangest things that has started to happen is that people I know with children around Daphne's age are beginning to report that they are pregnant again.  When my friend with a boy a month younger than Daphne announced her condition to me she noted, "if you had told me while I was in labor that I'd be pregnant again on A___'s first birthday, I'd have said you were crazy."  At some point, my husband and I hope Daphne will be lucky enough to have a sibling.  A year ago, practical consideration of this idea would have been unthinkable, whereas now it is probably just a little premature.  In the meantime, we are keeping our eyes open for the next set of milestones -- evidence that Daphne knows her eyes from her nose, the aforementioned first steps, and an intentional utterance of the word "Mama."

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