Walking With Baby
When my first daughter, Asmi, was born, I knew nothing about parenting. I had a lot of ideas about parenting, babies, and kids. It was 95% theory and 5% practice. I have five niblings (The gender-neutral term for the kids of your siblings), now ranging from twelve to eighteen, and my partner and I took care of our toddler neighbor two days a week for about a year. I also taught elementary, middle, and high schoolers, first in AmeriCorps and then in a Reggio-Emilia school for three years. Still, when UNMH discharged us with a three-day-old baby in March 2021, I had just learned how to put a diaper on, and I still didn't know how to use a car seat–we put the car seat in the wrong on the super short drive home from the hospital. The night we returned, I was in a full-blown panic, and it took the better part of a month before I realized we were doing the thing and doing it well.
Before Asmi was born, I was sure I wanted to be an adventurous parent. I followed the accounts of many people who hiked, kayaked, cycled, and traveled the world with babies and toddlers. I was determined to do the same, but that first month made me question everything. I was still deciding if we could go to a local shop, let alone climb mountains. Just going on the porch felt like a huge step. Then, almost overnight, things changed.
First, without any gear whatsoever, we left the front gate for something other than a doctor's visit. Within a day, we were on the next block. By week's end, we were at the end of four blocks that bound our section of the neighborhood. The following week, we were making figure-eights of the blocks that comprise the residential section of Silver Hill. The week after, we crossed the first significant road (a six-lane monstrosity that desperately needs traffic calming) and made it to the neighborhood's edge to complete a one-mile loop. While my parents were in town, I geared up with The Dad Shirt and began circling Roosevelt Park, then Highland Park, and surrounding neighborhoods. By the end of their trip, we had reached non-neighboring neighborhoods. I was walking with baby!
I gained incredible confidence with every step, and each jump reinforced the next until the two of us regularly embarked on three to five-mile journeys without a stroller. I carried Asmi freestyle for most of the first nine months. The fact that we had zero set-up time was a huge incentive to go as early as possible, walk until I found a spot to set her down in the grass, and then continue until the southwestern sun was high in the sky, letting me know it was nap time for both of us. I did this between classes and writing sessions (I was and still am a PhD student and college instructor), maximizing our active outside time with the closest mode of transport I could fathom. Sometimes, we talked or investigated a vista, a tree, a patch of flowers, or a local dog. Often, we stopped to talk to neighbors. But there were also long stretches of quiet where we shared the experience in our ways as baby and papa, drinking in this place we now call home together. We got close and kept getting closer, and with each journey, new worlds opened up, especially those inner worlds that I had long since learned to shut out of my conscious experience.
The poet-philosopher Antonio Machado famously wrote: "Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking."
On these walks, so much of my life began bubbling up. Things forgotten, suppressed, ignored, avoided, feared, desired, envisioned, and needed stepped out from the shadows. As we made footpaths together, another path emerged, leading to an extraordinary life. The only trouble is that we only make this path by walking through ourselves and mustering the inner powers we all have but rarely learn how to develop.
Walking this inner path requires a great deal from us. It requires a mental-emotional (some would say spiritual) confrontation with:
The Critical Inner Voice — the negative self-talk we confuse with our authentic selves. This voice tells us we are unworthy, unable, or undeserving.
The Fixed Mindset — The belief that our abilities and capacities are fixed traits.
Learned Helplessness — The belief that we cannot change our circumstances.
It also means confronting many social and cultural norms and the baggage of untold generations that weigh on us like stones tied around our feet as we swim toward the lives we seek. It's hard, at times unpleasant, and sometimes seemingly impossible.
Is it worth all the effort?
One of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes became the answer:
"It's all risky. The minute you were born, it got risky. If you think trying is risky, wait till they hand you the bill for not trying!"
I have always known this intuitively, but I ignored it. I spent most of my life before thirty waiting. I waited for the perfect time, perfect conditions, perfect whatever. Even when perfect came, however, it still wasn't quite right. It was too risky. Maybe next year. Maybe after graduation.
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Naturally, you might think having a newborn is the ultimate excuse for not trying. I thought the same thing and almost let it get the best of me. Then, out there on those walks, as Asmi and I shared our lives in the time before verbal speech, I realized that letting this one go–waiting for perfection yet again and not striving toward the extraordinary life I knew was possible, would be a crime not only against myself, but also against her, and potentially untold generations to come. I realized the truth in Abraham Maslow's words: "What one can be, one must be." This simple truth and the responsibility to become the kind of leader who can facilitate the path of my kids was an awakening. I realized these walks were not just a series of steps, a way to get air and exercise, or even to bond in the moment (although we did that to the fullest). Walking with baby became a shared life project. I knew we could walk toward an extraordinary life together, and because I knew that, perhaps only because of the quiet beauty of long walks with the loveliest of babies, I also knew that we must live an extraordinary life together. It was now our responsibility to ourselves, each other, and the world we were soon to build.
