My heart is not a black lump of coal

These past few days I've been reading the little storm that David Brooks'(!) class-and-parenting piece stirred up over at 11D, and at Crooked Timber, and so on. While I pumped, or wolfed down lunch (so I could go nurse my poor (self-)starving baby), or felt guilty that I was using precious paid day care time to do something other than work, per se.

It was awfully stressful to read. Especially as the debate veered from class issues (which I'd love to talk about, and I think I need to go read the book that started it all off) to day care issues. Not great for letdown.

Aside from long-term developmental issues, I worry—as do you, I'm sure—about the odd emotional situations lurking in this new set of relationships. For instance: one of the work-study students at Miss T.'s daycare has picked out T. as a "favorite." Which is good because she can convince her to drink an entire bottle at once, but is bad because the student doesn't really smile very much and she kind of weirds me out, you know?

But something I particularly worried about, before T. was born, heck, even before I was pregnant, was how I'd feel if she hit developmental milestones and I wasn't there. Which, given the fraction of her awake hours I miss, is not unlikely.

Well, it's happened. T.'s finally over her awful cough, which was not great for gross motor skills—for a few days she even forgot how to roll over, which is so two months ago. The obvious next step before she got sick had been sitting unassisted, but that got knocked entirely off the to-do list.

When I arrived at the center for today's lunch hour boobfest, T. was sitting. On the floor with the head teacher. Sitting happily next to a toy arch that had been set up with danglies at just the right height to keep her attention someplace that required real balance to maintain. Sitting unassisted.

I beamed and fell to the floor in front of them and cried, "Look at you, baby! LOOK AT YOU!" And felt clean, honest, joy.

Comments

[Lori]

I was worried about missing something, too - my mom is currently our babysitter while I try to finish my dissertation, so there are hours I'm not there for. But I sometimes feel so damned tired and like I just don't have any right answers, let alone all of them, that I've reached the point that I'm happy for grandma to teach her any new tricks that she'd like. I gush over them all the same. ;)

[YelloCello]

Aww. Here's to the clean, honest joy!

Will have to look into the Brooks piece...

[Nicole]

Hi! I just found your blog and will keep checking in with you because of our commonalities: I had a baby that was due around the time your babe was due (though she came two months early) and I'm starting a tenure-track job in the midwest Fall semester.

[Heels]

I love this blog and I'm bookmarking it.

Both of my kids walked first at daycare--my son just last week. I wrote about it in a recent blog entry.

I found daycare firsts to "feel" the same as you did--joyful. I didn't mind missing out; I enjoyed seeing the results.