Premature Optimization
or, how I tried to engineer my nine-month-old's entire future before lunch
It has been three and a half hours since my son last ate, and he has decided that the most pressing matter in his life is not milk but the eight inches of floor between him and the table leg.
I am trying to nurse him. He is doing the worm.
Somewhere in a browser tab is an online course that told me, in a very calm voice for a very specific fee, that a baby this age should feed every three to four hours. That I must leave a forty-five-minute moat between milk and solids, or the solids will storm in and displace the milk; and the milk, apparently, is still the main event. Somewhere in a book is the rule about wake windows: no more than three hours awake at this stage. Over by a minute and he is overtired. Under by a minute and he is undertired. There is, I am assured, a just right. There is always a just right. It is always one degree away from where I am standing.
And under all of it, the chart. My son does not sit high on the weight growth chart. He never has. The pediatrician says he is simply a very active baby. That this is who he is, that he is fine. She says it kindly. And do I believe her? Of course not. Because a mind like mine does not hear he is fine. It hears find a doctor who will hand you a problem to solve. Should I switch pediatricians? The thought arrives fully formed and reasonable-sounding, dressed up as diligence, as though the issue were her judgment and not my need for there to be an issue at all. A refused feed is never just a refused feed. It is a verdict waiting to be written. On him. On me.
And if - if - I get a few ounces into him, I don’t get to rest in the win. Because the next thing is iron. The next meal must be iron-rich, and it must also be a new flavor, a new texture, because the books are very clear: variety now, or a picky eater later. And a picky eater, in my head, is not a picky eater. A picky eater is a referendum on his entire future. We live in a foreign country. I have a career that does not pause. The machines are already doing my job faster than I learned to do it. How are we - how is he - going to afford to be the kind of person who pushes a plate away? No. He will eat the broccoli. He will have his Omega-3s. He will not be chased around a kitchen at age six with a spoon in someone’s hand. He will have the nutrition and the iron and the brain - the big, developed, future-proof brain - because I will optimize it into him one rejected ounce at a time.
There’s a thing we say in engineering. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. You’re not supposed to pour effort into perfecting a system before you even understand what it needs to do. I have, apparently, decided to ignore this for the single most important system I have ever been assigned.
I couldn’t help but wonder: when did love quietly turn into a performance review? When did every feed become a metric, every meal a deposit into a college fund made of neurons, every nap window a deadline I was already late for?
And then my phone rings.
It is my oldest friend; the one from before all of this. Before I was anyone’s mother, when we were just two girls. The most loving Auntie to my baby. She’s in her last trimester. She is calling to tell me that the baby she is carrying has a genetic disorder.
I stop trying. My son, free at last, makes a break for the table leg with the focus of a man who has never once worried about his iron levels.
And I listen to my friend’s voice do the thing a voice does when someone is being very brave on the phone, and my heart breaks in the specific way it only breaks for a person you have known since you were small.
And then, forgive me, the guilt arrives. Because somewhere under the heartbreak is a smaller, uglier voice asking how I dared. How I dared to spend my whole morning at war with a perfectly healthy boy over forty-five minutes and a green vegetable. How I dared to catastrophize a future for a child who is healthy, who is busy, who is hitting every milestone ahead of schedule. Ahead. While my friend sits on the other end of the line recalibrating what “ahead” will even mean.
Here is what I’m learning about a mind like mine. It does not know how to rest. Hand it a healthy baby and it will find the one ounce he didn’t drink. Hand it heartbreak and it will find the gratitude I failed to feel in time. I have a brain that turns everything - milk, iron, love, luck, even grief - into one more thing I could have done better.
I don’t have a tidy ending. I’m not going to tell you I scooped him up and felt nothing but grace. I held him and felt grateful and terrified and guilty and, underneath all of it, still quietly planning the iron. The optimizer doesn’t switch off. Maybe the work isn’t switching it off. Maybe it’s just noticing, every so often, that the system was never broken;
and that I was the only one in the room who actually needed feeding.
Author’s note: Thoughts, guilt, and milk: mine. Sentence polishing: AI assisted. Final say: also mine.