Up and Up and Up: What My Baby Taught Me From a Hospital Waiting Room

I’m writing this from a very uncomfortable plastic chair outside theatre. My littlest is in there right now getting grommets. Tiny tubes, a quick procedure, completely routine.

I know all of that. I’m a healthcare professional. I’ve read the stats. I could probably explain the whole thing to you with diagrams. And still, here I sit with a cold coffee, a phone on 12%, and my heart somewhere on the other side of those double doors.

So I’m doing what any slightly frazzled mom of three does in a hospital waiting room: thinking way too deeply about life. Because my baby is walking now.

Not the polished, Instagram-ready kind of walking. The wobbly, arms-up, slightly-drunk-sailor kind. And getting here? She fell. Endlessly. Onto her bum. Into the couch. Face-first into the carpet. Sideways into her big sisters, who were, naturally, absolutely thrilled. Over and over and over again.

And here’s the part that floors me (pun fully intended): not once did she decide that walking just wasn’t for her.

Quick physio-nerd moment. Researchers at NYU studied babies learning to walk and found that they took an average of around 2,368 steps and fell approximately 17 times per hour. Seventeen falls. In an hour. If I fell 17 times an hour at work, I’d be filling in an incident report and booking myself in for an assessment.

But my baby? She just gets back up. And then she falls again. And gets back up again. Until one day, without any grand announcement or certificate of achievement, she takes a few steps without falling. And then a few more. And suddenly, she’s walking.

Imagine if we approached the rest of our lives like that. The new skill. The business idea. The first 5 km. The career change. The hard conversation.

We try something once, it doesn’t go quite as planned, and suddenly we’ve decided we’re “just not a runner”, “not good with numbers”, or “too old for this”. We take one experience and turn it into a story about who we are.

My daughter doesn’t do that. She doesn’t fall over and think, Well, clearly I’m not cut out for walking. She doesn’t compare herself to the toddler down the road who’s already sprinting around the playground. She doesn’t feel embarrassed because she needed the coffee table for support.

To her, a fall is just information. Leaned too far forward? Noted. Let go of the coffee table too soon? Noted. Landed on her bum again? Fine. Up we go. No shame. No elaborate story about what this means for her future. No deciding she’s simply not a walker. Just another attempt.

And I wonder how many things we would do differently if we could learn to see our own setbacks that way. Not as proof that we’re incapable, but as part of the process of becoming capable.

I’ve run marathons, and I can promise you that there is no finish line without the hard miles. The long runs in the rain. The legs that scream at 32 km. The moments when your brain starts negotiating with you about whether you really need to finish this particular run. And the toenails I won’t discuss on a public blog.

None of those moments necessarily means you’re doing it wrong. Sometimes, they’re simply part of doing something difficult.

As a physio, I talk to my patients about progress all the time. Strength doesn’t appear overnight. It develops as we challenge the body, allow it to recover and gradually build on what it can do. Progress isn’t always a straight line. Some days feel easier than others. Sometimes you take a step forward and then feel as though you’ve taken two backwards. That doesn’t automatically mean you’ve failed.

Of course, there’s a difference between the normal discomfort of a challenge and pain that signals an injury. Pushing through everything isn’t the answer, and knowing when to pause, adapt or get help is part of the process too. But when something is difficult simply because it’s new, unfamiliar or takes practice, perhaps we don’t need to interpret that difficulty as a reason to stop.

Learning anything worth learning looks a little like my baby in our lounge. Fall. Sit. Look around. Grab the coffee table. Up. And again. And again. Until something that once felt impossible becomes something you do without even thinking about it.

Any minute now, a nurse is going to call my name, and I’ll go scoop up a sleepy, grumpy, very brave little girl. I’ll probably be relieved to have her back in my arms. I’ll fuss over her, make sure she’s comfortable and bring her home.

And tomorrow, when she’s back on her feet, wobbling around the lounge and inevitably falling over again, I’m going to try to remember who the real teacher is in our house. She doesn’t wait until she’s good at something to keep going. She keeps going, and that’s how she gets good at it.

Maybe there’s something in that for all of us. Maybe the thing you’ve been avoiding isn’t a sign that you’re not capable. Maybe the first attempt was never supposed to look impressive. Maybe you don’t need to feel confident before you try again. Maybe you just need to give yourself permission to be a beginner.

So here’s my question for you: What’s the thing you fell at once and quietly gave up on? The run you never tried again. The goal you put aside. The conversation you keep avoiding. The version of yourself you decided was out of reach. What if one setback wasn’t the end of the story?

Get up. Try again. And then try again after that. And if someone came to mind while reading this, send it to them. We could all use a reminder sometimes.

Talya x