When is a baby not a baby? I think it’s when she’s walking toward you, her four teeth on show, arms outstretched. Last month, my daughter took her first steps—two micro-strides toward, well, the TV remote (her favorite toy). I’ve been trying to wean her off the TV remote with no success (the battery-less remote I Amazoned has not abated her button-stabbing desire). But walk-wise, we’d been in training for months. After a local mum said her kid first toddled the day before she turned one, I felt a rush of, if not jealousy, then laser-sharp focus. I wanted the baby to walk before she turned one so I could casually mention it at the intimate family dinner I’ll host the night she graduates from Yale.
I set my girl on an Olympic-style regime of pushing a walker round my house. We ran drills from couch to TV remote. Her balance was miserable, her core Petits Filous. She loitered, she crawled, she lurched from bannister to smooth wall like a drunk. She showed no desire to join the upright. She really wasn’t bothered—until she was. A Rocky training montage and a slight delay later, I have, somehow, a true toddler. (Fifty-three weeks old still feels Yale-speech worthy.)
Of all the landmarks we celebrate as parents (and grandparents and friends and random people in the park), walking is a biggie. It’s resolutely public. Nobody notices, let alone applauds, when your baby develops a wicked sense of irony, becomes noticeably empathetic, or starts preferring Joni Mitchell to Avril Lavigne (“I’m With You” key change notwithstanding). Walking is visible; you can date it, WhatsApp it to the group. Walking is a clear, measurable milestone, unlike the thousands of microscopic glimpses of who she’ll become. Babies roll, babies crawl, babies (almost) say “dada,” but walking is the only one she’ll carry into adulthood (nobody congratulates me for sleeping through the night). Walking is the first thing she’s done that feels recognizably human rather than recognizably baby.
So, when is a baby not a baby? We have certainly crossed a border. There have been 53 weeks of unquestionable babyhood, but over the course of two wobbly steps, she’s become something else. She’s not a toddler toddler, but the appeal of standing on her own two feet means she’s no longer someone I can instinctively scoop up without possibly pissing her off.
Before she could walk, if I entered a room, she entered it too. If she wanted to move somewhere, desire rendered via hand gesture, I was the one who translated her need into action. She wasn’t quite an accessory—my accessories don’t puke on me—but she was certainly an extension of my own physicality. My shoulders were her public transport, my arms the Central Line, my hip a Lime bike saddle. Walking on her own signals the existential end of being carried. Of course, she still demands to be picked up every six seconds because she apparently hates to see me perform a task with both my hands, but something weighty has ended.
For a year I’d always known exactly where she was; now I know her rough whereabouts. I’m not quite empty-nesting, but she’s moving away from me, which feels foretelling. She’s never gone for long, but she is going. These miniature away-days from the company office of my embrace get longer each time, her hunger for the world (the cat, the sockets, the TV remote) increasing exponentially with each step. Yet every expedition ends the same way. She’ll totter six feet, panic slightly at the enormity of this newfound freedom, then pivot and wobble back. She yo-yos away and back again.
