Taking the Test of My Life

Azita had her 1-year well baby visit last Thursday. It went pretty well. She’s finally gaining some weight. Her hemoglobin count is slowly rising. She’s blazing past all the walking and talking milestones. She’s up-to-date on vaccines. She’s moving on to big girl foods and appropriately learning how to feed herself and eat and drink using big girl utensils. I left the doctor’s office feeling a sense of relief that seemed somewhat familiar but strangely out of context all at once. In fact, the whole week leading up to this visit I had a similarly strange out of context feeling. I couldn’t put my finger on it until this morning as I reminisced about my college days.

I remember each semester as midterms or finals would draw near — that gnawing feeling that I just wasn’t prepared. No matter how long and hard I studied or worked on a paper, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going to fail. Then I would leave the exam or turn in the paper and suddenly my perspective would take on a different hue. I’d realize that I had sufficiently prepared, or that I had placed too much importance on the grade in the first place. Everyone knows the old adage about hindsight.

When I finally finished my formal education I thought I had put all of those feelings behind me. Of course I expect to feel a little nervous before a big work deadline or presentation and a little relieved when it’s done, but that is so very different. Only in school are we ever tested so granularly. In real life, we’re evaluated more generally. Our work life for the past year is evaluated for overall success, and you provide specific examples that illustrate your achievements. If an individual project or piece of a project doesn’t turn out perfect, it doesn’t really matter as long as you have achieved or surpassed your more general goals. In a way I think that’s what keeps people sane. I can’t imagine maintaining the emotional intensity of being continuously tested for much longer than the four to 12 years people attend college.

That is, I couldn’t imagine it, until I realized that part of what makes motherhood so stressful at times is that you are constantly being tested in much the same way you are tested in school. Any of my readers who are mothers probably know exactly what I’m talking about. What happens when you attend a family function with your baby? Everyone examines how you dress and feed your baby, how you change your baby’s diaper, how your baby is transported to and fro…I can’t even begin to list the petty feedback I’ve heard over the past year in which I’ve been a mother. That’s not even the worst of it.

From the minute your baby is first born, it can often feel as if your worthiness as a mother is determined solely by your child’s progression along a series of charts. Is her weight, height and head circumference moving along an appropriate curve? Does she achieve certain milestones during the correct month of life plus or minus a standard deviation? And you are tested so frequently in the first couple years. First you visit weekly then monthly then bi-monthly then tri-monthly. Each time it’s the same. The week of the next visit you start obsessing over the little things. Why did your baby choose this week of all weeks to go on hunger strike and get a raging diaper rash? You convince yourself that she will lose weight, falling below the curve on which they say she should be progressing. You convince yourself that your doctor will accuse you of neglect because your daughter has a rash that won’t go away.

In other words, you start second guessing whether you are ready for your next test. Because that’s exactly what is happening here — or at least, that’s what it feels like. As mothers, we are tested so regularly and formerly in much the same way we are tested when we’re in school. And once we leave the doctor’s office, we either leave with that feeling of elation — I passed! — or we leave with that sinking, gray feeling — I think I failed.

I can’t say I’m 100% sure why this is the case, and maybe it’s only the case for me. But I feel sure it isn’t. I participate in a number of discussion boards for mothers, and I hear others say the same thing. “My child is off the charts in weight. What did I do wrong?” Even worse, “My doctor says he will have to initiate a CPS investigation if my child doesn’t start gaining any weight.” (Really, I swear that I’ve read that and not just once.) We blame ourselves, because frequently we are blamed by the world when things don’t go exactly as planned or expected. Hell, we are frequently blamed by the world when things are not progressing better than planned. Somehow we’ve failed the test, even if we do everything exactly how we are supposed to (although who really knows what that is — it seems to change every month).

I’m lucky to have found such a wonderful pediatrician. She is reassuring and helpful all at once. She has the best advice not just for how to help your child thrive but also how to handle the ups and downs that parenthood causes in the rest of your life –your career and your marriage. I still remember when I entered her office for the first time a few days after Azita was born. I felt so overwhelmed and scared, and I left feeling so much better that all I could think was “I love that woman.” I frequently feel this when I leave her office. But she says the same thing every time as I’m re-dressing Azita and she’s leaving the exam room, “You’re doing a good job.” It feels so great when she says it. My insides are so warm and fuzzy they glow. But somewhere in the back of my mind is the realization that she’s saying I passed a test, and that means that there is always the possibility I could fail the next one.

The difference is that so much of this test is out of my control. It’s a hard row to hoe for a type A personality like myself. Like so many other mothers I meet, either in person or virtually, however, it’s just the lesson in humility I need. I can provide the best I can for my daughter, but in the end she is a person with free will. I cannot make her eat. I cannot make her sleep. I cannot make her walk or talk or do anything else. I can try my hardest to get her to do all of the above and hope that she ends up healthy and happy when all is said and done.

Most of all, I can focus on my day-to-day experiences and my larger goals that are not as testable. After all, what really matters more — my daughter’s weight at her 6-month checkup or whether she is a happy, well-adjusted, and independent young woman in 20 years? When I became a mother, I was not making a choice to go back to school, but somehow I regressed to that mindset. What I’ve finally realized internally is that motherhood is a career, and I need to start treating it like one.

Zahra is a longtime working woman and a new mom. She is an Iranian-American born and raised in the D.C. metropolitan area, married to a Missouri-born American. Technology has always been the focus of Zahra’s past writing endeavors, both professionally and recreationally, until her husband and then baby came into her life. Now she writes mostly about the collision of her and her husband’s lives and how they are reconciling their different backgrounds as they raise they daughter.