Abra is taking her first wobbly steps into the world.  Like everything she does – from her delivery into this bright life, to the way she eats, to how she learned to crawl – her progress has been slow but steady.  She has been cruising for months, using anything at standing-height to help propel herself around a room.  For weeks I’ve listened to others’ declarations that she’d be walking “any day now,” knowing from past experience that she was nowhere near that milestone.  Although her personality is just unfurling from its tight coil, I can already tell that she is someone who must fully master a skill and feel confident in her abilities before moving forward.  This is nothing like me.  I have always crashed through life, leaping before I look, my head often lagging behind my heart.  I rarely read instructions, intuiting my way through thick problems.  I throw caution to the wind.  Needless to say I was a very early walker, and as parents are wont to do, I projected my own unfair expectations on Abra, assuming that she, too, would follow my trajectory.

After doing everything in my power to encourage her walking, I finally accepted the words that I had spoken so hollowly to every person who asked if she was walking:  Not yet, but in her own time.  As soon as I released my death-grip on the idea that she should be walking by now, she lunged from the coffee table to the couch, her little legs hitching forward.

I know that Abra has a great deal to teach me about patience and letting go.

I have never understood why parents spend so much time fawning over their child’s developmental milestones, the ones that every single human being passes through at one time or another.  Now here I am, snapping so many photos of her first steps in the world that I could create a flip book of her journey.  I have taken dozens of video clips trying to capture a significant sequence of sturdy steps, and I watch them over and over and over again, as if each loop will reveal something previously unseen.  Puzzled by my own behavior, it finally dawned on me as I was running this weekend – my old, practiced legs having carried me thousands of miles over a lifetime – that I wasn’t trying to memorialize a moment so much as I was seeking to understand myself.  Each time I see Abra working hard to master a basic skill that I tend to take for granted, such as eating or walking, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that I went through the same process.  I think of the years of slow and steady practice that were involved in allowing me to run for a full half hour around a sunny park on a crisp autumn morning.  As I learn to be a runner, huffing and puffing my way through the trees, I reach a point halfway through my run where I feel like giving up.  I remind myself to take it one step at a time, to concentrate on the slip of trail just in front of me and no more.

I love the motion blur.

On Saturday afternoon, as light streamed through our bedroom window, Abra launched herself from our desk toward the middle of the room, a clear runway of carpet stretching ahead of her.  Usually she takes a few halting steps, her arms raised overhead like a goalpost, a smile stretched gleefully over her face, before tumbling down.  But this time I stood in front of her with arms outstretched, urging her forward.  As I shuffled backward she confidently walked toward me, taking one and two steps, then a dozen, then a record twenty before falling down in a heap.  Struggling to understand the difference between this and previous attempts, I realized that she had been focused on me, that proverbial slip of trail just in front of her.  And in one gasping breath I suddenly understood a basic fact that had somehow escaped me all these years:  My own mother or father had been by my side as I took the same tentative steps into the world, agonizing as I teetered and threatened to fall flat on my face.  I was overcome by a rush of love and gratitude as I thought of the hundreds of hours that someone stood by my side, waiting to catch me if I fell, teaching me to move through life in the only way possible:  One foot in front of the other.  No matter what divergent roads our tired legs may have carried us down, despite the loneliness we sometimes feel, we all learned to walk with the help of somebody else.