Developmental Delays Made Me a Mother

My son had a developmental evaluation a few days ago. It was his second in his eight months of life.


My son ultimately passed his screening, though he’s lagging a bit behind average in his gross motor development. This didn’t faze me at all; we’re a family of late walkers and early talkers. We’re clumsy and intellectual. Maybe he’ll surprise us and grow up to be a star athlete rather than a book worm, but for now, he’s following a path toward becoming himself, and, like his hair color and eye color, it's likely to imitate his closest relatives. 

The strange thing is that I hadn’t always been this accepting. Almost seven years ago, I had encountered the professionals at Early Intervention for the first time, and it was shocking and scary for me. I had cried. I had screamed. I had punched my pillow. I had called friends and relatives in absolute choking tears. Why?

All because of one tiny little glitch in my daughter’s development: she wasn’t supporting weight on her legs. It was a melodramatic, hysterical reaction to have to something so incredibly insignificant, but, at the time, it seemed like one of the biggest crises I had ever encountered.

 After my son’s evaluation, I started thinking about how much I have changed in the last seven years. I did an archaeological dig through the ancient ruins once known as Myspace. In one of my last posts before I abandoned the glittery .gifs and horrible background music, I had begged for help from my friends on a blog post:

 

:( 
I took Vivian to the doctor yesterday and everything seemed just fine. The doctor was gushing about how chubby and cute and bright she was, and was saying that she seemed to be ahead of the curve on every milestone. "She's doing great, you're doing an excellent job with her!" the doctor had said. 
And then came the reflex test. :( Vivian is way behind the typical curve with controlling her feet; she's supposed to spread her legs out and try to balance on her feet as I put her down, and she doesn't. I had no idea that she was supposed to be doing that. :( Most babies her age can stand for a  few seconds with support. 
The doctor looked at her legs, spine, and feet, and said there didn't seem to be any physical problem, and said that because Vivian's so talkative and aware, it's highly unlikely that there's a mental problem. But, for some reason or another, she's behind on her motor development... Far enough behind that she's going to need classes with a group that helps children with developmental delays. I can't even describe the way it felt when they handed me the pamphlet for Hand in Hand, which deals mostly with children who have autism and cerebral palsy. It's not that I think she's "better" than children with delays, I just never imagined that she would have any.
 I feel horrible and panicked and guilty. I don't know why I've got it in my head that I did something wrong, but I feel like I'm a terrible mother. 
Most likely, she just doesn't know how to use her legs much because she never has to (I'm holding her all the time) but it still scares me that it's a significant enough delay to warrant treatment. The doctor reassured me that it's very unlikely that there's anything truly wrong with her, and said that, most likely, she's just going to be a late walker. She's either ahead of the curve or right on it with all her other keystone developments. I still feel really awful, though. :(
Please hug me. 



“I feel like I'm a terrible mother.”Oh, how those feelings had wounded me, back then. I had done everything right. All-organic diet, exclusive breastfeeding, natural birth, delayed cord clamping, no medications, no mercury, no vaccines. I did everything right, and as much as I had tried to tell myself that I wasn’t so arrogant as to think that developmental delays only happened to bad parents, the feeling was there.I did everything right. This was supposed to happen to someone else.When I see the things I wrote and felt during what seemed like a total crisis—something that really wasn’t a big deal at all—I feel a conflicted jumble of anger and pity for the mother I was seven years ago. I want to hug her. She was asking  for hugs, after all, with the tone of a scared child who had accidentally waded into the deep-end before knowing how to swim out. She was a mom who knew how to be a good parent only if everything went exactly as she planned. And when it didn’t? She thought it was all over.Here’s what I wish I could go back and say to that scared woman, myself at twenty-one: You’ve only been a mom for six months. You have so, so, so much life ahead of you and your children (yes, children, plural—there’s a black-eyed baby boy waiting for you in your future!). You are so naïve that, right now, you honestly think that the best moments of parenthood are already behind you, just because of a failed developmental screening.

They’re not. They’re still ahead of you. They’re still ahead of me, too.Your daughter’s developmental delay is the very, very beginning of you becoming a mother. You’ve loved her for the last six months, but you weren’t her mother yet. Not really. Because being a mother isn’t about knowing what to do based on those endless hours you spend poring over the internet, plagued by your neurosis. Being a mother is about love, and it’s about acceptance. And until you can really look at yourself and say, “My child is different, and I love her exactly the way she is,” you’re not a mom. You’re just practicing.If your daughter hadn’t been born different, it might have been years before you really, truly became a mother. You would have accepted her, but the acceptance would have been superficial and empty-- acceptance of an idea of who she should be, not an acceptance of who she actually is. How can anyone say that they really love someone, if they want to change who that person is? How can you really say that you’re a mother, if the child you really love is an expectation—not a reality?
There are so many wonderful things in your future, and your daughter’s developmental differences aren’t obstacles to that. They are catalysts for it. That early babbling? She’ll say her first word in just a month and sentences won’t be far behind. Later, she’s going to spend hours upon hours talking to you about cats and dinosaurs and magic and love. That clumsiness? It’s perfect. You’re not going to have to struggle to keep up with her, or worry about her climbing your countertops. All those things that just make her seem… odd? Oh, Juniper. That’s the best of the best of it. She will be wonderful. You will love her, and you will love her differences, and you will not want to change a single thing about her.One day, you will bring a little baby boy into the world, and it will be entirely different because you will have already learned this critically important lesson. You will already know how to be a mom, and when you meet him, his soft little body in your arms and his fuzzy black hair against your fingertips, you won’t fall in love with an expectation of who he is. You will fall in love with anything and everything that he may become. You will know the most important lesson a mother can possibly know: that your job of creating your child is over when they are born, and that your task from then forward is to discover them. You will be a better mother because of the lessons your older child taught you.We have a long, long way to go. Neither of our children are anywhere near the difficult ages of adolescence, and both of them are happy and healthy, and the biggest challenges we have in parenthood are almost certainly waiting for us down the road. These are days that we will remember as the happiest: when she was a bouncing ball of energy nearing seven years old, and when he was a thoughtful little cuddle-bear who loved touch-and-feel books and lullabies. Things will be hard, one day, but that day isn’t yet, for me or for you. Right now, from your world in 2008 and my world in 2015, we are both looking at the good times. Enjoy them while they last, and I’ll do my best to do the same.This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of something wonderful and magical.