They're Only Little Once

By Sonya Spillmann

From my spot at the left arm of our couch, I text my oldest daughter. She’s home on winter break after her first semester of college and has blissfully sunk into her spot— where the sectional connects and the cushions swallow her up, approximately four feet away from where I sit.

Want to go? I write below a link to a movie we both have seen already, both have seen together. Without looking at the other, without acknowledging that the phones in our hands are connecting us, she texts me back.

Yes!

We both burst out laughing and my husband, her father, who is sitting in his spot—a middle cushion next to a pile of laundry he’s folding—looks to me, then her, then back to me. “What?” he says. What has he been left out of? This secret joke makes us laugh even harder.

The coming week will be my daughter’s last days at home for a while and I want to enjoy it.

To enjoy her.

Us.

This.

//

I won’t blame the book. Or the person who gave it to me. So I will simply say that while I was joyfully and easily moving through my first pregnancy, I was also pained by becoming a mother without my own. Searching for guidance, for assurance, for direction, I was given a book—on how to get through my days with an infant—by someone I deeply trusted. By someone I’d reached out to for advice. This person offered it to me with glowing recommendations and I—ever wanting to please, to follow in the footsteps of people I love and respect, to be the good student and a future good mother—read, highlighted, and underlined the book cover to cover.

To say I ascribed to its thesis—to schedule one’s baby—was an understatement. I would be the embodiment of a clock.

//

Nadia and I walk into the dark theater, take our seats next to each other, and start to devour a large bucket of popcorn. From the opening, we begin to catch lines and notice props we didn’t see in our first viewing. We laugh at the same places, cry at the same places, our hearts soar by the end.

“Lunch?” I ask when it’s over. She shrugs, not wanting to impose.

“Only if you want to,” she says. I want to.

And? I want her to impose. I want her to know how much I enjoy having this time with her, with us together.

//

My daughter is a week old. My in-laws come to stay and help. My mother-in-law holds the baby. Maybe I had showered, maybe I had laid down? But the baby is now asleep in her arms.

When I walk into the living room and realize this, I pick my sleeping child up and place her in the bassinet just five feet away.

A conversation then happens between us that sounds, in my memory, like my mother-in-law offering to continue holding her, and me saying that she needs to get used to going to sleep on her own. My mother-in-law then says, “You can’t spoil a baby” and then I say something about how the book I read says, or rather infers, that it’s possible you can.

And I didn’t want a spoiled baby. She can learn early that she doesn’t need to be held to go to sleep.

With compassion, my mother-in-law nodded, didn’t say a word, and walked away from her week-old granddaughter into the kitchen.

//

The day after our movie, we arrive at Costco twenty minutes after the doors open. “I like to be here as close to opening as I can,” I tell her, always squeezing in the kind of motherly advice I didn’t get. “Beat the rush,” I say and Nadia nods, not realizing that I had to figure out something even as simple as the best times to beat the crowds on my own.

We grab a cart and walk into the store. She’s come with me to restock snacks for her dorm room. “But no Goldfish,” she says.

“No?” I ask. She loves Goldfish, has practically survived on those faux orange cheese-bits for most of her life.

“I’ll eat a whole bag in one day—I can’t keep doing that,” she says with a seriousness I find endearing. I’ll ask her to grab a box anyway, so her brothers and sister can eat them at home.

We walk through the aisles one by one. She chooses a blue bag of beef sticks, a box of individually packed apple sauce cartons, and microwavable mac & cheese cups. We turn a corner and navigate around a small blonde toddler, “pushing” a cart. The little girl is flanked by her mother, who wears snow boots, leggings, and an oversized shirt. “Okay, a little more straight,” Mom says. “Now we’re going to turn. Good job,” she encourages, “That’s it.”

I can’t help but smile, so much cuteness in such a tiny body. My daughter grabs pretzels, fruit cups, and when we get to the middle of the store, picks up a book that catches her eye. “This one looks interesting,” she says, raising it up for me to look at.

“Put it in the cart,” I say.

“You sure?” she asks. Yes, I’m sure, I nod. She looks at the price tag. “Man, books are expensive,” she says. Children are expensive, I almost say back. Instead, I tilt my head towards the basket. Put it in. She drops it down and we continue to check items off my list.

But her reading? Us together? Children, in general? This time? Is there a price I wouldn’t be willing to pay?

//

The book I’d read told me to feed her, keep her awake, then let her sleep. This meant that if she was sleeping, but—according to our three-hour schedule—it was time to eat, I’d wake her. If she started to get sleepy while nursing, I would do everything I could to not let her drift off. Instead of blissfully staring at her head full of inch-long dark brown fuzz, instead of settling down into the couch and just sitting with this miracle of my making in my arms, I’d tap her feet. I’d stand up. I’d unlatch.

The book said keeping her in a routine was my best chance of having a predictable and scheduled baby. Which meant a predictable and scheduled life.

Which, given the unpredictability of life, is exactly what I wanted.

So that’s what I did.

//

Nadia pushes our cart overloaded with everything from seltzers to chicken pot pie toward the front of the store. We pass another mother with another toddler pushing another cart, but this mom — long brown hair, wearing a flannel and black winter boots—also has a baby strapped to her chest. She reminds me of what I must have looked like shopping when Nadia and her little brother were young.

At the checkout, there’s yet another mother, this one with a baby in a front carrier. She’s nuzzling his hair against her chin, cooing and gently swaying. I smile at her. I still find myself swaying when standing in place, even all these years later.

Nadia helps me unload our cart: strawberries, grapes, spinach, chicken nuggets, a two-pound block of cheese, two dozen eggs, three gallons of milk. The cashier rings us up and I pay. Eyes wide, Nadia looks at me as we walk away. “Is it always that expensive?”

I smile at her innocence. “It’s at least that,” I tell her and watch this realization settle into her face.

“You want a snack?” I ask, tilting my head towards the hotdogs and sodas.

“No,” she says. “Unless they have churros.”

//

Nadia left for her first semester of college four months ago. I cried a thousand tears over our separation, over how this change would affect our family dynamics. And I’d heard that when kids come home from college for the holiday break, it can be a significant challenge—all that independence crashing up against house rules and parental constraints. But her return wasn’t as challenging as I’d anticipated.

One night at dinner, the six of us sat around our table and whether it was all the noise the kids were making or a certain story they were telling or just me being tired from making food all the time, my oldest son said something like, “Mom’s sick of us” or “Someone needs some alone time.” It was all in good humor, and I laughed along with them, even as I put my head in my hands.

“I’m okay,” I said, eyes facing the table.

“Sure, Mom,” my son said back.

“No, no.” I said, looking up and grabbing my fork. “I’m grateful for this.” Our eyes meet. Something deep in me tightens, loosens, then tightens again. I want to tell them.

“I’m not going to cry,” I say, to warn them. They need to know I can talk about this without tears. But I also need them to know the truth. When tragedy falls on you when you’re young, well before you ever thought of having children, it’s hard to know what and when to tell your kids the parts of your story that make you who you are— you as a whole person, not just what they know of you as their mom.

As objectively as I can, I say, “I didn’t get this.”

All four of my kids look up at me.

“I graduated high school and—” I take a breath, “and that was it.” For a brief moment in time, no one moves a muscle. “I didn’t get a summer after graduation with my mom. Or a Thanksgiving. Or a first Christmas break.” After my mom died, the family I grew up in changed forever. For the rest of my days, grief would accompany every joy.

I look around at each of my children. My gaze lands on my oldest daughter. “I didn’t get … this.”

//

“You really can’t schedule a child younger than four months,” an older friend of ours says. Our families met at the zoo, my husband and I with my daughter in her carrier, he and his wife with their three active children. He’d noticed how every three hours, no matter what we were doing or where we were—and even if she was sleeping soundly on my chest—I’d stop to nurse her because “it’s time for her to eat.”

“Babies that young don’t really … follow a schedule,” our friend had said again later in the day. I see now how he was trying to reassure me. Encourage me. Release me. I nodded, understanding in my head that he knew what he was talking about—in addition to being a father of three, he was also a pediatrician. But I also completely ignored him. My child, my baby, was going to follow a schedule. She was going to adhere to the plan.

I hear it now. I see it. My rigidity. My desire for control and predictability. But I also see a young mom just not knowing any better. Not knowing there was an alternative path.

I was just trying to figure it out, and I thought I was doing the best thing for my child with what I knew then.

//

After the movie we saw together, we did go out to lunch. She ordered a juice made with ginger and beets. “Gross,” I’d said, then ordered my own made with kale and apples. We rehashed the movie and snuck a little laugh at the couple behind us who wore identical plaid flannel shirts.

As a child, she wasn’t a cuddler. Of course she’d sit in my lap to read before naptime or bed, but she wasn’t a toddler who would nuzzle up to me just because. As she got older, if I tried to sit close to her, she’d edge herself away. At one college visit, I tried to grab her hand and she visibly shrugged me off. I always thought this distance was because of how, during those first years of her life, I was so strict about her falling asleep on her own. I cared more about a schedule than what might have come more naturally between us, if only I’d trusted myself to know what my baby needed and when.

I knew she was only little once. But I didn’t know what love could look like if I really soaked her in. If I really, truly enjoyed her.

But I do now.

I pay for our lunch then we walk outside. I link my arm in hers, and she lets me.

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Sonya Spillmann is a nurse, an essayist, and freelance writer living in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She's incapable of small talk, loves red lipstick, and spends the majority of her afternoons driving children around in her minivan. You can read more through her Substack, Finding Feathers.

Photo by

Jennifer Floyd

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