Why We Count Babies’ Ages in Months
Parenthood comes with a flurry of new vernacular. This norm kept me tied to reality.
Last spring, the medical technician who swabbed my daughter for COVID-19 laughed at me when I told him she was 13 months old. In retrospect, I could have said, simply, “She’s 1.” But when he asked Madeline’s age, I defaulted to the language of the pediatrician’s office and the playground: counting babies’ ages in months or even weeks. The issue was trivial, yet it still makes me cringe more than nine months later. My shame was fundamentally about how I had lapsed into parroting the vernacular of motherhood without really understanding why—and how I was now doing it all the time.? Who had I become?
