Weight, Height and Happiness

Elliot turns four months old today!  When I sent these photos to Tyler yesterday (with Elliot and I both emerging from our mid-morning nap), he wrote back: "Such a little boy!  No longer a baby!"

Likely over 20 pounds now (he was 18.5 at his last pediatrician visit nearly a month ago), our little boy wears nine month old clothing and has already nearly outgrown his crib.  I'm watching him on his swing now (as he looks at our bonsai tree and smiles) -- legs already dangling off, and wondering how much longer he can stay on it.

I got an awesome text from one of our best friends this morning: "How's he doing?  Weight?  Height?  Happiness?" -- and it nearly stopped me in my tracks because why isn't this something that's talked more about at the doctor's office? (it's like a blog post I wrote about for the Maternal Health Task Force when I was pregnant here).  Not saying we ought to be checking babies for baby depression (oh geez, I can only picture that...), but isn't disposition also a key piece of overall health and well-being?  We check weight and height almost excessively (there was a two week period when Elliot was sick with an awful cough/cold and we needed to take him in almost every other day; his weight and height were taken every single time!)  While his doctor calls him a "high growth baby" (indeed he is!), there's no way too much was changing every other day.  Yet meanwhile, I've never been asked about his general disposition, temperament, or all-around happiness.  Obviously something like "happiness" is hard to quantify, much less compare and plot on a bell chart (not that you'd even want to); whereas weight and height are easy to plot and graph and turn into percentiles.  But the danger in that is it can easily become obsessive -- I remember Tyler and I being bewildered when our friends would spew all of their children's statistics and percentiles, and now I have to prevent myself from offering that information to anyone who asks a simple: "How's Elliot?"

As I'm starting to figure out, "happiness" for a new parent is a tricky thing.  Ask nearly any American parent what they want for their children, and they'll say, "I want them to be happy" (I've inserted the modifier because I've also asked dozens of low-income Indian mothers want they wanted for their newborn baby through my work at LifeSpring.  By far the most common answer: "education".  Tells you something about the two cultures, but that's the subject of another blog post).

Yet how do we instill happiness in our children?  For someone who thinks about (and reads about) happiness quite often, it's funny that I haven't really thought about this very deeply since Elliot was born.  It's not that I didn't care about his happiness, of course.  But as new parents, we were still quite low in the parental equivalent of Maslow's hierarchy -- taking turns staying awake at night, for instance, to make sure Elliot was still breathing, for goodness sake.  When a college friend resumed work after maternity leave, she posted on FaceBook: "Operation Don't Kill the Baby is complete."  I laughed because there's truth (or at least feels like there is -- babies are thankfully so much more resilient than we give them credit for).  At business school reunion, another friend told me that her mantra for the first three months post-partum was: "Feed baby. Heal mama."

And so with Elliot's birthday today to mark the end of Q1, it feels like a major transition point.  We are no longer afraid to change his clothes for fear that his little arms would break (seriously, why don't they make newborn clothes easier to put on?? -- the only times Tyler and I would snap at one another during those blissful early weeks was when we were putting clothes on him -- "I thought you knew how to do this?? Watch his head!")  While we still wake up twice every night to feed him, he now knows the difference between night and day, and goes right back to bed after feeding, barely even opening his eyes through the process (rather than being up and wanting to play at 2am).  For the most part, we can now differentiate between a tired cry and a hungry cry and a gassy cry, and respond accordingly (which makes us feel like super hero parents, rather than hopelessly clueless and incompetent -- WHAT DOES HE WANT?!?!)  

And with this transition, I find myself thinking more about happiness: how do you raise a happy child?  With Elliot, it seems to come naturally: he smiles in the morning as soon as he wakes up and sees you; he smiles at the baby in the mirror; he smiles at shadows and the literal dance between darkness and light; he smiles at Mr. Panda; he smiles on the diaper changing table (which, much to our surprise, has become his "happy place").

All morning, I've been thinking about that poem that I just posted: "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."  It's an amazing visual and analogy.  Being strong and sturdy and stable... yet remaining flexible, yielding -- with the ultimate purpose of setting the arrows to flight.  It reminds me of an amazing quote by Hodding Carter I read shortly after giving birth to Elliot: "There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children.  One of these is roots; the other, wings."

As I reflect on these quotes this morning, I realize that happiness is important but not sufficient as an end in and of itself.  Besides, I can't give Elliot happiness anyway; it's his own journey to find that on his own (while I could have guessed that Mr. Panda would bring smiles, I never could have predicted that looking at shadows would bring such wonder and delight).  Plus we all know happiness is fleeting.  

Instead, what I hope to help instill as he grows up is meaning -- reminding him of our shared roots as a family -- his tribe; while helping him discover his own wings as a unique individual.  Because perhaps meaning itself is what helps us move from situation-specific happiness to something even more lasting and fulfilling as we move throughout life: joy and purpose.