Wow, open the door to a little sentimentality and it plows on through like some tear-jerking freight train. I stumbled on these clothes while straightening up Jack's room. It's like some big crazy room-sized plastic salad in there most days, dinosaurs jumbled with play food and wooden blocks and the toy knights he calls his adventure guys, all served on a bed of about seven bazillion Matchbox cars. I was doing my best to reunite all the various toy pieces with their sundered kin and clear just the eentsiest bit of floor space when I opened an unmarked box and found all of Cole's newborn clothes. The discovery literally floored me: I suddenly just sat flat on the floor looking at the contents through a haze of tears, all organizational momentum gone.
I don't know why I was so undone. I honestly thought I had given all the early infant stuff away months ago to some friends with an even newer baby, but apparently some things had been too special to let go of. The tiny little cowboy shirt, the duckie suit that he wore home from the hospital, the unbelievably wee huaraches...maybe it's that he's so big and competent now, on the verge of walking, aware and opinionated (if uncomprehensibly so). He'll turn one in just a few weeks and he's just barely a baby anymore. I am sad for the days he was just a curled-up little peanut in footie sleepers, smacking his lips as if nursing while he slept in my arms. I know there were hard days then, those crazy sleep-deprived new baby days when I felt so exhausted and overwhelmed and isolated, days that seemed they would never end when I desperately wanted them to, but at that moment I would have given anything to go back.
But motherhood being what it is, time for tearful reverie is limited. Cole woke up from his nap just then and began calling out in his native Urdu for someone to come get the baby, already. I folded the clothes into a grocery sack and gave them to a woman I know from a parenting group for her ethereally beautiful five day old son. All except for the duckie suit. And the huarches.
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