What To Do When You See Your Baby’s First Steps When Your Partner Is Absent
It was a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, I was folding sweatpants on the living room rug, iced coffee sweating through its koozie on the stained coffee table, and Lila, our 11-month-old, was gnawing on a stray cheerio she’d fished out from under the couch. My husband Matt was three hours away at a mandatory work retreat, the one he’d complained about for three weeks because the dates landed right when our pediatrician said Lila would probably start walking any day. He’d kissed her forehead before he left and half-joked, half-warned me, “If she takes her first step while I’m gone, you better text me immediately. Don’t you dare keep it from me.”
When she pushed up off the couch leg, wiped cheerio crumbs off her chin, and took three wobbly, wide-legged steps straight to my laundry basket, I screamed so loud our cat bolted off the windowsill. My first instinct was to grab my phone, which was sitting right next to the basket. My finger hovered over Matt’s contact, and then I froze. What if he wanted to see it in person? What if I could get her to do it again when he got home tomorrow, and he could have the whole live experience, no blurry screen in between? I’d heard my mom tell the story a hundred times: when I took my first steps, my dad was working a double shift at the factory, she waited to tell him until he got home that night, convinced I’d do it again for him. I never did, and he still brings it up sometimes, 30 years later, how he missed my first steps. I didn’t want that to be us.
I snapped a blurry 10-second video, saved it to my camera roll, locked my phone, and didn’t send a thing.
When Matt got home the next evening, we cleared the center of the rug, broke out the puffs Lila goes crazy for, and coaxed her for almost an hour. She crawled back and forth, pulled up on our legs, cackled when we clapped, and not once did she let go and take a step. Matt put on his fine face, the one he uses when he doesn’t want me to feel bad, and said, “It’s okay, she’ll do it when she’s ready. There’s a million more first steps.” But I saw him scroll through my camera roll later that night when I was in the kitchen, like he was looking for something I hadn’t told him about. When I crawled into bed that night, I fessed up. I told him I’d seen it, I had the video, I just wanted him to see it live.
He was quiet for a minute, then turned to me and said, “I would’ve rather gotten that blurry video while I was sitting in a boring seminar than waited a day and a half to find out. I don’t need a perfect moment. I just want to be part of the moment when it happens.”
That conversation stuck with me, and I’ve brought it up to almost every other parent I’ve talked to in the two years since. Half of them have had this exact same dilemma, and almost all of them have leaned toward the same choice I made at first: hiding it to wait for the perfect shared moment. What I’ve learned, from talking to other parents and from our own messy experience, is that we put too much pressure on the exact first occurrence of a milestone. First steps aren’t a single event that’s ruined if both parents aren’t there for the first one. They’re the start of a whole new phase, and there’s a hundred unrecorded steps after that first one that are just as meaningful.
The concrete stuff I’ve picked up, that I pass on to new parents now, is pretty simple. If you find yourself in this spot, the first thing to do is send the video or text immediately, even if it’s blurry, even if they’re in a meeting, even if you think you can get a better one later. If you’re worried they still want to see it live, just add one line: “I’ll try to get her to do it again for you when you’re home, but I wanted you to see this right now.” That takes the pressure off both of you. Second, don’t delete the bad first video. The blur, the sound of you screaming in the background, the half-cut-off frame where their foot is out of view—those are the details you both laugh about later. Third, if you do what I did and keep it secret for a few hours or a day, don’t keep it secret to try to recreate the moment. Come clean right away. The longer you wait, the bigger the disappointment feels when the recreation doesn’t work out.
I talked to a mom last year whose husband was deployed when their son took his first steps. She sent him the video the second it happened, and he watched it on his lunch break sitting in his army truck. That video is still his lock screen, even though their son is 7 now and runs circles around him at the playground. Another dad I know missed his daughter’s first steps when he was at his own mom’s funeral. His wife sent the video an hour after it happened, and he said getting that little piece of joy when everything else felt terrible was one of the things that got him through that week.
Lila is two now, she runs all over the backyard chasing our old cat, and trips over her own feet at least once an hour. Last month, Matt had to go out of town again for work, and Lila climbed all the way up the big playground slide by herself for the first time when we were at the park. I took a blurry video, sent it to him immediately, and added that line I use now: “I’ll get it on camera again when you’re home, but this is the first one.” He texted back 15 minutes later, a screenshot of it set as his new lock screen.
We still joke about the first steps incident sometimes, Matt teases me that I almost hid the best baby memory we have from him. It’s not the perfect story we imagined when we were waiting for her to walk, with both of us kneeling on the rug, clapping, crying, getting the perfect video. But it’s our story, and it taught me something that applies to almost every first milestone that comes after, from first words to first days of school. Not every big moment happens when everyone can be there. Sharing the messy, real, blurry version right away beats waiting for a perfect version that never comes.
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