It's been happening a lot lately. I'll be standing in line at the grocery, my most beloved of pastimes it would seem, in a zombified state as I wait for the cashier to get to my order when a mother of five (or some other staggeringly impossible number) will begin gushing over Mina. I get it, she's adorable, so I don't mind. I'll sleepily smile back my "thank yous" and engage in non-committal conversation about how wonderful children are, despite the work. "Aren't we lucky, yada yada yada." And then, inevitably, they'll ask, "Is she sleeping through the night yet?", as if the pulsing purple bags under my eyes aren't answer enough. And I'm not really sure how to answer. "Well, she used to," I'll say, "but she stopped around the time Thanksgiving hit." They stare back at me like I have three heads, pityingly, but still as if my daughter's regressive sleeping habits are somehow an indication that she's not human. Because human babies, or so I'm told, begin sleeping through the night and never look back.
In fact, human babies spend most of their first year sleeping, not just through the night, but in general. This is such a widely held belief that friends in my PhD program congratulated me warmly when I told them of my pregnancy. "What perfect timing!" they would tell me. "You'll be able to get so much work done while the baby's sleeping, probably write your whole dissertation since you won't be teaching." Being the optimist I am, I believed their lies. When asked by the L&D nurses at the hospital what I do for a living and whether I'd be returning to work, I would proudly declare my graduate student status. "I'll be prepping for my exams and then writing my dissertation while I stay home with her," I'd beam, never stopping to wonder at the looks they'd give me as they backed out of the room. Looking back now, I can only conclude they delivered a lot more non-human babies than I gave them credit for. Because non-human babies, like Mina, are born alive, alert, and enthusiastic -- okay, maybe not so enthusiastic -- which is why the notion of writing a dissertation, or even beginning to think about my dissertation, in the first year of her life was absolutely ridiculous.
But when it comes right down to it, I'm beginning to suspect there is a much wider range for what it means to be a "normal human baby" than originally thought. During our first visits to the pediatrician in those early months of Mina's life, my husband and I would go armed with a notepad brimming with questions: Why isn't she napping? Why does she eat every hour on the hour? Aren't fifteen wet diapers in one day excessive? Should her head spin around like that when she throws up? And our overly patient pediatrician would always respond with an I've-been-there smile and say, "That's normal." What I'm coming to discover is that babies are as unique as the adults they grow into. Some are night owls, some are early birds, and some are both. >< Some have insatiable appetites with black holes for stomachs, and some have to be arm-wrestled into the high chair. Just as we can't nail down what "normal" behavior is for adults (or at least, we have an entire field dedicated to sorting out what it means to be "normal" and even they argue about what "normal" is), "normal" behavior for babies is an equally tenuous thing to pinpoint. My new motto? Expect the unexpected cause it's probably gonna happen. Oh, and savor those rare "normal" moments...
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