Growing Pains It’s Often Hard To Accept That The Youngest Is No Longer A Baby

The signs have been long in coming. I have been shedding the accouterments of my previous life bit by bit: the infant car seat, the baby gate, the impossibly tiny baby clothes, the tricycle.

Then the Great Divide was crossed, with the help of cake, balloons, a magician and an illconceived art project involving glitter glue.

Now it is official: My younger daughter has turned 5.

So ends babyhood for her. So ends mother-of-babyhood for me.

It went like that. People tell you it will, but you only really see it in hindsight. And on those endless nights spent walking the halls with an inconsolable baby, the idea of time moving too quickly seems laughable.

I’m not laughing now. It was hard, it was fun, it was amazing. Now it is over. We plan for our younger to remain our last; we will not pass that way again.

With that knowledge, every step along her path took on the weight of finality. This would be the last time I would experience the thrill of feeling a baby grow inside me, the last time I would lose track of time watching my belly roil and buckle with the unseen flailings of my unborn child. I nursed her with the knowledge that I would never experience that intense symbiotic intimacy again. I bathed her knowing that what I was using as a baby bathtub would soon go back to being a sink.

Her firsts were my lasts: Her first smile, her first tooth, her first step were the last such milestones I will see.

I will see other milestones as she grows. But the drama of the headlong rush of enormous accomplishment that marks the early years is over.

A stage in my life is over, too. I was the mother of young children - a desperately and frequently needed love object, a nosewiper and diaper-changer, a person whose pockets overflowed with pacifiers, plastic bags of Cheerios and small rubber dinosaurs.

Now I am the mother of school-age children. My constant presence is no longer required. I have forgotten how to pin diapers. I have moved from planning days around naptimes to scheduling summer camp and piano lessons.

My pockets are my own.

The change is happy. The onetime toddlers have grown into good company without growing out of their interest in parental cuddling.

And they are so easy now. Small children absorb their parents’ time like a black hole sucks in light. To a great degree, I have my life back.

It comes at the price of experiencing the peculiar charms of very young children - the Frankenstein’s monster walk, the baby voice, the utter lack of selfconsciousness, the incongruous amusement of a small child singing a song with grown-up lyrics by the Indigo Girls (“… then you had to bring up reincarnation/Over a couple of beers the other night …”).

In my eagerness to slow things down, I have tried my best to keep my baby my baby, lest she not have enough material for her analyst someday.

I call her “Baby.” I secretly like seeing her suck her thumb, warnings of impending orthodontia notwithstanding. I help her dress in the morning, laying her 3-foot-tall body on her bed like an infant on a changing table.

My 7-year-old, who enjoyed no such coddling, has upbraided me severely.

“She can dress herself,” she informed me frostily one morning.

“I’m just helping her with her socks,” I said lamely.

The big sister was having none of it. “She can put on her own socks. I’ve seen her do it,” she said, and refused to leave the room until I left my former baby to dress herself, which of course she easily did.

Such is the stuff of birth-order personality traits. But for a parent reaching the end of the first leg of the big voyage, it is hard not to want to savor a few last moments.

In retrospect, the days of the endless nights ended too soon.

MEMO: Barbara Brotman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Write to her at: the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.