Perfect- A New Mother's Story
When the doctor first lifted Juliet up for me to see, she was 6 pounds, 8 ounces and full of life. Her skin was pink and healthy, her eyes were wide open, she had ten tiny fingers and toes, and was just about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
She was just… perfect.
As the weeks went on, she gained a healthy amount of weight, started to lift her head up and look around. Everyone commented on how alert she was, how advanced she was. She was obviously ahead of the curve in many ways, I thought. She really is just perfect.
When she first pulled to a stand at seven months and was cruising along at eight, my husband and I overlooked the fact that she wasn’t crawling much. If she wanted to cruise, then why bother with the crawling? Still, we were glad when she began to crawl at nine months and took off like a shot walking across the room soon after her first birthday. I would happily peruse my What To Expect – The Toddler Years book and check off all the milestones for twelve- and fifteen-month olds that she was meeting and surpassing. Everything was going so perfectly for my beautiful little Juliet.
Still, she wasn’t really saying much. Sure, she would let her wants and needs known by pointing and grunting. And she loved the “dah” sound. She would orate for a minute at the time on many a subject: “Dah, dah dah dah. Dah dah dah dah dee dee dah.” And for a while, that was fine. She was babbling, jargoning, whatever the experts called it. Perfectly normal.
Then time passed. She celebrated her 13-month birthday, her 14-month, her 15-month. Juliet was still sharing her thoughts using “dah” almost exclusively. We’d also hear a “dis” or “dere” for “this” or “there”, but beyond that, really not much of anything. Even “mama” – the word that I had most wanted to hear since she emerged in the world all perfect and beautiful fifteen months prior – was conspicuously absent from her vocabulary.
Then yesterday, I finally took the step of having her screened for a speech delay. The evaluation was painless and actually fun for Juliet. For me, however, it was admitting that everything about my daughter was not “perfect”. She was not exactly where I expected her to be. And, I have to admit, I felt a bit disappointed. Not in my daughter. Not even a little. There is so much pride in my heart for her that there is no room at all for disappointment. I instead felt disappointed in myself for not doing everything perfectly. I felt that I had let her down by not saying enough words to her, by not repeating enough sounds back to her. I had let her down by not making her perfect.
I acknowledged those feelings in myself. But then I moved on and put the disappointment behind me. My daughter is smart and hard-working and very, very loving. How is that not perfect? The only thing that yesterday proved to me was that there was an area that Juliet would have to work harder on. And that was OK. Such a challenge had never stopped my little girl before.
And about this idea of “perfect”? I have decided that Juliet is indeed perfect – she is the absolute perfect daughter for me.
Christine Forrest is a working mother of one who lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She is an English teacher at a juvenile detention center who enjoys writing, running, and every single moment with her daughter Juliet. She maintains Juliet the Princess.
