Patience and Milestones As a New Mom

Patience is something I’ve always struggled with. As a kid, I was incredibly impulsive and always wanted to be on to the next thing. Now I have kids and people have always told me that kids teach you patience and I’m here to report that in my case, it did and it didn’t.

My oldest is now 21 months (side note: I finally understand now why so many mothers use months instead of years. Technically, my son is still under two but saying he’s only 1-year-old or even 1-and-a half feels weird because it’s not fully accurate). Between one and two-years-old, there are just so many milestones and I can’t help but feel a bit angsty.

The first one was the crawling. My oldest son didn’t start crawling until he was almost one. My youngest JUST started army crawling a few days ago and he is almost nine months old. Both of these situations had me feeling angsty especially because I joined a lot of due date groups during my pregnancy and it was really disheartening seeing other peoples’ kids starting to crawl and reach other milestones as young as five-months-old. I kept thinking to myself “Is something wrong??” and the mom guilt also crept in, thinking I wasn’t doing enough because my kids were behind on their developmental milestones.

Cue: the best pediatrician.

My pediatrician, Dr. Stacey is one of my favourite people I’ve met. She takes great care of my children and assured me that my kids were on track and that some take a bit longer to reach milestones. She made me feel like I wasn’t an utter failure — which, I knew in my logical mind that I was not; but it was a nagging thought that was always in the back of my head. 

Other things that test my patience are days where my oldest and youngest just are having a bad day. They are not mad at each other, and not particularly at us, but just screaming all day. Before having kids, I LOVED long weekends, now I’ve grown to fear them a little. The week always feels shorter when we don’t have the help of daycare. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids but three full days with no help for 2u2 is no easy feat after a long week at work. 

The days where they are both squealing in harmony in happiness definitely make the days they are red in face, screaming bloody murder, better. Knowing that they love each other now (Teddy needed to warm up to Charles — this took about seven months before he would really interact with him. Prior to that, he’d look at Charles with fear in his eyes) makes all those terrible days worth it. 

I don’t know if it’s the hormones (I blame my hormones kind of like when people always blame mercury, which always seems to be in retrograde) or just growing into myself more, or it could be because I have to exercise patience more with my two kids (which make other things seem so much less significant), but I’m finding myself getting less angry and even if I am hideously angry, it happens less often. 

It’s weird. I always thought of myself as someone who had a short fuse. Since having Charles and Teddy, my fuse for others remains somewhat the same, but my tolerance for riff raff has gone up the charts. I am no longer upset at the lady with an unconsolable baby on the plane or annoyed at babies in public who are loud and rambunctious. In fact, I have a new appreciation for women and men who brave the public with their screaming babies to try socialize their kids and to make the best out of the worst situation. After 32-odd years, I get it.