Threads of sorrow, threads of hope
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It was the first thing that greeted us when we came home: the drying rack, filled with exquisite, tiny, pristine clothing.
Cashmere sweaters. Merino socks. A delicate-wash-only embroidered dress, fashioned of the smoothest organic cotton. All lovingly laundered in gentle, unscented, eco-friendly detergent, waiting patiently in the sunroom for our newly minted family-of-three to return.
The sight of it was a gut punch.
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I’d realized a week before her due date that I hated all her clothes.
I knew everyone would want to pick things for her to wear, so I had refrained from registering for any clothing. And two baby showers later, sure enough, I had a dresser full of miniature outfits, every single item gifted with love.
But also, almost every single item pink.
For some reason, I never envisioned her as a pink girl. Lavender was the color we’d chosen for her crib sheets and her handmade mobile and the custom stamped artwork on her nursery walls. Purple wasn’t on trend that season, so it wasn’t anyone’s fault that her clothes were the wrong color. But that didn’t change the fact that none of them felt right.
So a week before she was due to need them, I rush ordered a bunch of items I loved from fancy stores I only rarely shopped in for myself. Items that were ridiculous, certainly – in what world does a newborn need a cashmere sweatjacket? – but the out-of-this-world exorbitance of their price matched the out-of-this-world exorbitance of my love for her, and I just couldn’t help it. I checked out my cart with a flutter in my heart, and spent the next 5 days obsessing over the tracking.
Then finally, one evening as I stood in the kitchen cleaning up dinner, I felt it: a contraction. My baby girl was almost here – but the clothes I’d painstakingly ordered for her were not!
I labored slowly at home for a night and a day, and by what felt like divine intervention, the packages arrived one by one that very afternoon. With tags emblazoned “no tumble dry” I knew it was too late to bring her home from the hospital in them – but they would be lovely for newborn photos!
So even though I generally abhor doing laundry, in between contractions I dutifully ran them through the wash and hung them up to dry.
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We ended up burying her in those clothes.
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The only item from that fateful last-minute order to survive my daughter’s death was the sweatjacket.
It was the lightest dove gray, a perfect small-scale replica of the full-size version, but inconceivably, painfully soft. I just couldn’t bring myself to entomb that dream under six feet of earth. Not when we were already interring so many others.
And so I folded back the meticulously knitted arms – barely bigger than my thumb – and tucked under the hood with the twin minute functional drawstrings. And I gingerly placed that little woolen packet of broken-hearted yearning in a barren drawer in our vacant nursery, praying I’d have reason, someday, to take it out again.
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The sweatjacket was always meant to be a hand-me-down. She was the eldest of what I was certain would be at least two more siblings, and likely many cousins-to-be. That was how I had rationalized $125 for a piece of cloth roughly the size of a dishrag.
It has been not-quite-eight years since I pulled that tiny cashmere sweatshirt from the wreckage of our life. And it has already been worn by four new children – my daughter’s cherished younger brother and sister, plus one of my amazing nieces, and one beloved nephew.
When my son was born a year after her death, the sweatjacket was one of the few hand-me-downs he was able to inherit (because of ALL. THE. PINK. – I generally consider myself pretty progressive when it comes to gendered children’s items, but I thought it might raise some eyebrows if I clad my son in his dead sister’s gowns).
He wore it out of the hospital, the day we finally brought our child home.
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To this day, I hate doing laundry.
It piles up for weeks on end, basket upon basket of fresh, clean clothes, beckoning.
Ugh. The task of folding them consistently lands at the very way-down-bottom of my long list of priorities.
As the days tick by, my husband and mother eye the mounds of textile, picking through for towels and adult-size items that they know I won’t object to. They offer to help with the kids’ clothes, but I decline, ostensibly because I am particular about the way they’re folded (so that they’ll fit nicely in the drawers).
Which is the truth.
But not the whole truth.
Because when I finally do find the time to sit down and fold my living children’s clothing – miniature arm over miniature arm, tiny sock paired with tiny sock – I am thinking of all the outfits I never got to fold for her. I am wondering what colors she would have picked, if she hadn’t been robbed of the chance to choose for herself. I am thanking my lucky stars that those little t-shirts keep growing and growing and growing in size with each passing season.
Because I may absolutely hate this goddamned, ceaseless, Sisyphean chore my subsequent children have bestowed upon me.
But I absolutely love being their mom.
What did you do with your baby’s clothes? Keep them? Pass them on? Get them out of your sight forever? Use them again? What do these items mean to you now?