I consider myself a fairly competitive person, but the only competition I care about winning is that with myself. I’ll set a personal goal, like a new half-marathon time or monthly freelance earnings, usually not even tell anyone about it, and then try to reach it on my own. It’s never really mattered to me how other people are faring–until I had a baby.
Now, I’m one of those insufferable people who just can’t help but compare my child to other children. When I heard about someone’s 4-month-old rolling over, I ran home and started coaxing my daughter to go from tummy to back. When I read about a friend’s son taking two-hour naps, I rocked my little one to sleep until we were practically blue in the face. When I saw a video on Facebook of a baby of a similar age audibly laughing, I became this insane goofball trying to get a giggle out of my girl.
At our local library’s weekly story time, my daughter is usually one of the youngest of the bunch. The other tots crawl and cruise around with abandon while mine sits contently in my lap. Still, that doesn’t keep me from eagerly looking at all the 8- and 9-month-olds wondering, will she be where they are some day? Of course she will. I’ll keep an eye on all the basic milestones and developmental markers that docs ask parents about, just in case we run into any problems. But that doesn’t keep me from wanting things to move just a bit more quickly.
The results of my frustration are always disappointing. Babies fuss when they’re pushed to roll too soon, they cry when they’re not ready to nap, and they give blank stares when you play marathon rounds of peekaboo before they can comprehend what you’re doing. I can’t force my daughter to do things she simply isn’t ready to do yet. My baby will develop at her own pace, and I need to relax about that. So where does this need to compare come from?
I think it started when I was pregnant. When you’re carrying a baby people like to ask questions. How long did it take you to conceive? Are you feeling nauseous? How much weight have you gained? How are you planning to give birth? They’re not asking the questions in a vacuum either. There’s always someone they want to compare you to, whether it’s themselves or their daughter or their neighbor’s friend’s cousin’s wife. When you discover that you took longer to make a baby than your mom did, that you feel worse and gained more weight than your friend, and that you’ve gone against the grain with your birth plan, you start to think you may have gone off the deep end too and need a point of comparison to make sure you’re on the right path.
Then your baby is born. Everyone wants to know how long the birth took, how much she weighs, how long she is, and whether she seems alert. The comparisons come flooding in again. It’s hard not to get caught up in them and take a defensive stance, which can turn offensive on a dime.
Now I’m making a concerted effort to stop looking at how my baby stacks up against the others in her playgroup and on Instagram. Otherwise, this urge to compare will only get worse. So by the time she’s in school, I’ll be the one teaching her that the real competition is only ever with herself.
Whitney C. Harris is a freelance writer living in Westchester, NY. She had her first child, a daughter named Rowan, last summer. Find her at whitneycharris.com.
