Milestones

Over the past few days, all of the babies around me seem to be hitting major milestones.  My niece is sleeping through the night, my work friend’s baby recently said her first word, and yesterday Facebook told me that one friend’s baby is walking and another is crawling.

Is there a Facebook setting that can remove posts like this?

While nothing can quite match the gut-punch of a pregnancy announcement, these baby milestones are pretty depressing to hear about.  I’d even contend that they’re worse than the actual births.  Why?  Here’s four reasons:

They’re more surprising.  Birth is rarely a surprise.  When you announce your pregnancy on Facebook, I’ll probably make a mental note of your approximate due date.  If I see you on a regular basis, I’m going see you getting bigger and realize you’re getting close.  Plus, you’re going to give me all sorts of other reminders that you’re about to have a baby (a recent Facebook example: “The milk I just bought expires AFTER the baby's due date!”).  So, I’m mentally prepared for you to give birth.  Baby milestones?  Much less precise, and unless you’re really annoying you’re probably not posting “Baby is getting really close to taking his first steps!” to Facebook.  The milestones sneak up on me.

They’re cuter.  Let’s be honest: while cute, all newborns sort of look like my thumb after I spent too long in the bathtub.  It’s easy to get desensitized to the parade of similar-looking sleepy newborn photos, but by the time milestones hit, those babies’ personalities are starting to shine through and it makes the pictures so much cuter.  A first toothless smile below crinkly little eyes? So sweet.  My friend’s baby toddling across the room with a serious face in his tiny baby jeans and plaid shirt, looking like a miniature grown up?  Adorable.  The cuter these babies get, the more my heart aches.

They never end.  While birth is a singular event, there are tons of milestones for me to hear about.  Babies smile, roll over, sleep through the night, crawl, walk, talk… etc. etc. etc.  So many things for you to tell me about your baby!  And, even worse, the volume of information keeps growing as more and more people keep getting pregnant and having babies.  I already have everything from pregnancy announcements to first-day-of-school pictures on my newsfeed, and it’s going to keep snowballing until it meets some sort of critical mass and I lock myself in the bathroom to escape it all.

They show the passage of time.  Whenever my friends’ babies reach milestones, all I can think of is the fact that we’re falling farther and farther behind.  A small, irrational part of me expected everyone else’s babies to stay babies until Henry and I had ours, but of course they won’t: these newborns are becoming babies are becoming toddlers are becoming kids.  And all the while our baby isn’t reaching any milestones, because our baby doesn’t even exist.  It’s only going to get worse, because I am painfully aware that any babies born from here on out were conceived after Henry and I started trying.  In other words, please excuse me while I go lock myself in the bathroom.