Last night when I was desperately trying to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for the companywide presentation I had to give at work today, when my toddler sat wide awake on the couch at 11:45 saying “Play Midgie, play Midgie” a thousand times – I put you on. Instinctively, I reached for your thin fleece and ratted edges, the ghost of your drawstring. You were just what I needed, my unlikely suit of armor.
Toddler refusing to sleep? Please. You and I have been through way worse.
I bought you when I was pregnant with my first and living across the ocean. I didn’t know a single thing about pregnancy or motherhood (and not a whole lot about myself as a woman) – but I knew I needed comfortable pants. I knew I wasn’t going to be a khaki capris and fitted polo kind of mom. Something in me said, “You’re going to be a hot mess. All the time. Embrace it.” And we did.
I wore you to the hospital the night my first child was born, the first leg of the 23-hour journey that ended in a purple slip of human and a fat, terrifying reality slap. I wore you the calm, sunny November morning my second child greeted the world. I can’t remember, as is often the way with third kids, if I actually wore you to the hospital for round three, but I know I wore you through to the gory, gorgeous end of my final pregnancy and often. You were comfortable, safe. You made me feel like me, like Mommy. Even when my own body was morphing beyond recognition, topsy-turvy posture and ballooned feet, when even my face stopped looking like me, I marveled that one single garment could adorn this gargantuan stranger and also, inexplicably, my usual form. You were a curious portal from one self to another. A skin I didn’t need to shed.
I wore you when I carefully packed our belongings – a pitiful showing – into seven cardboard boxes to ship back over the ocean when we decided to come home.
I wore you when the sickness rushed and my face sought the cool tiles of the kitchen floor, when Baby 2 made his presence known and I scrambled to piece together my master's thesis in between growing a person and bartending late night shifts at a crab shack.
I wore you on walks, during workouts, to parks, during 4 am feedings. You’ve been peed on, sicked on, shat on, spilled on, painted on and torn.
I no longer wear you to be comfortable. I wear you to be comforted.
You remind me how my body can stretch and contract and grow and transform, how I can be utterly myself and also unnaturally foreign in my own skin, how I can recover, how I can prepare, how I can evolve. You remind me that my lap can cure someone’s deepest troubles, that balls-out dance parties right before bedtime are actually a marvelous idea, that tiny hands make tiny flour prints when you bake together, that life isn’t stored in photographs or Facebook posts, that most problems really do come out in the wash.
One day, the clutter and suffocating chaos or our life as a family will close in on me and I will have an irrational and unforgiving bout of spring cleaning. These moments hit me, wildly, from time to time. And I will throw you away. Too beat up to donate. Too worn to keep. I’ll hold you for a long minute and try to justify your place in my closet. I’ll fail, and into the trash bag you’ll go, with an unspoken history fraying alongside your threads.
What will I reach for instinctively when you’re gone?
My babies, now nine, now four, now almost two, they still pile on my lap and curl into my skin and kiss my stomach and hold my hand. They still connect to my body, the body that housed them, as some loose remnant of themselves. I wear them still, my round-faced, towheaded accessories of the heart. Of course, what I’m really asking here is this: What will I reach for when they are gone? When my house is void of their small feet and my arms, quietly, empty?