In the early days of my daughter’s life, I found myself consumed by the scale. I visited the pediatrician every few days, holding my breath as the nurse weighed my squirming baby. I would close my eyes and silently wish for even the slightest gain, but each time the scale stubbornly revealed the same number. Tears would mingle with my daughter’s cries as I carried her away, feeling a mix of embarrassment and anxiety.
After each disappointing visit, the pediatrician would help us devise a new strategy: nurse every two hours, nurse and pump, then supplement. I accepted this increasingly complicated routine, sacrificing my own peace of mind in the process. I would return home with my little one, mentally preparing for our next weigh-in, praying for any sign of weight gain.
To think I would face such a challenge with my baby’s weight was something I had never expected. During my pregnancy, I had skipped buying newborn clothes, confident my child would be bigger than I was at birth. I had always been told I was small, but now here I was, grappling with my daughter’s 7-pound frame and the emotions that came with it.
In the past, I had learned to let go of the scale as an indicator of my own health. I focused instead on my strength and endurance—how fast I could run, how long I could hold a plank, how much I could lift. Yet, my daughter’s struggle with weight brought back memories of my own disappointments. I often resorted to extreme measures in my attempts to lose weight, trying every trendy diet and workout regimen I could find.
This fixation on the scale took a toll on both of us. I sacrificed family time for boot camps, while my daughter endured a relentless cycle of nursing and pumping, leaving little room for the joys of early motherhood. I even skimmed the fat off my extra milk, trying to fortify her food with extra calories.
Yet, time and again, I was met with disappointment on weigh-in days. “Is she hitting her milestones?” my lactation consultant asked. In response, my daughter looked up from my chest, cooing sweetly. Despite her slow growth, she was alert and meeting all her developmental benchmarks.
“Are there plenty of wet diapers?” she inquired, to which I nodded. “So why the anxiety about the scale?” This question struck me. I had managed to release my own obsession with numbers, yet I was struggling to do the same for my daughter, reigniting old feelings of inadequacy and frustration.
A wise friend offered perspective when I shared my worries about my daughter dropping below the 10th percentile for weight. “Someone has to be in the lower percentiles,” she reminded me. This simple truth helped me see that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and there is little we can do to alter what nature has given us.
In the end, despite the numbers, my daughter was thriving, and so was I.
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Summary
In the journey of motherhood, the author reflects on the struggle with her daughter’s weight gain and the obsession with the scale. Through a series of pediatric visits and well-meaning advice, she learns to shift her focus from numbers to her daughter’s overall health and happiness, realizing that bodies come in various forms and that a child’s well-being cannot be measured by weight alone.