Passages

It begins slowly.

We put away the tiny socks, the mobile, the gemini. I folded up the onesies. The bottles and black and white patterned toys go to Goodwill.

Then the pace of everything escalates: the boppies have no more use, the baby tub, the high chair, the things I tied on the crib rails that sing, the pack-n-play.

Just as these items trickled into my home one-by-one, their names new to me like learning the vocabulary of a new language, they rapidly outlive their usefulness for my once very tiny soft baby, who now tries to stand on them or use them to build forts.

The gear in the storage area begins to talk to me at night: asking me why I'm holding on to it.

Someone else could be using me.

Are you sure I will be used again?

Will I be outdated when you turn on my switch next time?

I ask myself the same question.

The smaller gear is not as pushy about leaving.

The pacifiers went away in February.

The diapers in May, and with them, the changing table.

The crib is coming down this weekend.

It is the last vestige of the way her room looked the day we brought her home from the hospital.

It's exciting to watch her (and her room) evolve from baby to young girl. And it is a reminder at how fast it all happens.

I once came home from College (753 miles from home) unnannounced. I was the last to go away to school, and the last to leave an empty room behind. When I opened the backdoor by the kitchen, my mother was standing at the end of the long hallway, carrying a laundry basket into the guest room where she folds clothes. She stopped and glanced up at me and continued walking. When I said her name, she ran back into the hallway saying, "Oh my God! It's really you!"

"But, you just looked at me," I said.

"I see you girls here all the time. I didn't think you were actually here."

I know what she means now.

I walk into my little baby girl's room now and I still see her learning to crawl, pulling up on things, even when she walks past me to put on her clothes

all by herself.