![]() ![]() I stood at the door and stared at that little IKEA table for several minutes. And they would never know how my son's tiny finger had traced the letter A in shaving cream onto its surface, over and over and over again. So I placed the table on the curb with its matching chairs, knowing someone would pick it up the second I turned my back. ![]() But by five he’d long outgrown it, his long, grasshopper legs barely fitting underneath. As a small child, he’d sat there learning how to say duck and purple, struggling to properly pinch a crayon in a tripod grasp. One of the most difficult things I ever got rid of was my son’s tiny, paint-splattered toddler table. A cord of intense memory feels tied from every object directly to my gut. Which I think is part of the reason it’s so emotional for me to let go of my son’s old toys, tiny clothes, and baby furniture. Every new word, every lifting of a spoon, a cause for elation. It was sometimes incredibly difficult and confusing, but the flip side of that was that every achievement also felt like a call for fireworks and champagne. If typical parenting was like simply walking into a room, our entrance felt more Floor Is Lava - lots of frenzied leaps, slipping and occasionally landing hard, while grabbing wildly at whatever might prove useful. That said, weekly rounds of ABA, Speech, OT, and PT was not how I had imagined my son’s early years. We remain immensely grateful for this, as we are all too aware of how many families struggle not just to find decent therapists, but to get any therapy at all. Therapies that were tremendously helpful, and that were conducted by kind, skilled therapists whom my son adored. ![]() My son was diagnosed with autism at 19 months, and much of his toddlerhood was filled with therapy. Having a child with autism was sometimes incredibly difficult and confusing, but the flip side of that was that every achievement also felt like a call for fireworks and champagne. ![]() A cupcake flashcard can become so much more than a stock photo of a pastry with sprinkles. The plastic bulldozer he was clutching when he first said, “I love you.”Īnd if your child struggles to meet certain milestones, as my son did, well, this stuff can have even bigger, heart-thrumming feelings attached to it. The little booties your son was wearing when he took his first steps. It can feel like a trick of both the mind and the eye: How am I washing a youth medium Minecraft hoodie, when it feels like only yesterday I was pairing socks the size of cotton balls?įor some of us, holding on to baby items can feel like trying to hold on to a moment in time, especially those big, milestone moments. One minute you’re nursing your newborn at 3 a.m., the next you’re clutching that child’s hand as they climb onto the school bus. Many parents feel attached to baby items, I think partly because parenting can feel like witnessing one of the weirdest, most surreal, slow motion magic tricks on earth. I gazed at the long-forgotten card, then at the dresser, now not wanting to part with either. I felt a tug in my chest, as if a fishing line had become hooked on my heart, and someone had given it a yank. I remembered how much he delighted in the picture of the cupcake - and how much we delighted in him learning the word “cupcake.” I stared at it, and for a moment, I was lost in a memory of my son as a toddler receiving Applied Behavior Analysis therapy. The card showed a photograph of a cupcake. When I finally forced myself to go pull his Star Wars t-shirts and Spongebob sweatshirts out of the dresser, I discovered a flash card jammed at the back of a drawer. Considering our son is now 10 and five feet tall, he is in fact well beyond a “big boy.” Parenting can feel like witnessing one of the weirdest, most surreal, slow motion magic tricks on earth. The old dresser had initially been selected so it could also double as an infant changing table. So recently, when my husband decided it was time we update our son’s room and replace his long, ornate baby dresser with a “big boy dresser,” I could feel myself resist. We sleep, quite literally, on a bed of my memories, and it’s a wonder my husband’s dreams aren’t twisted visions of Oklahoma!, finger-paintings, and lovesick poems about Travis Cox, “the hottest senior boy ever.” My husband and I have one of those bed frames that has huge storage drawers underneath, drawers that I am sure were intended for things like bed linens nestled in sachets of lavender, but into which I have crammed photos, my son’s artwork, old letters, my high school journals, and Playbills. Living in a shoebox-sized Brooklyn apartment (as I have for most of my adult life) can make this a troublesome habit. My husband likes to throw around the word “hoarder,” but as we are not living among stacks of broken microwaves and families of raccoons, I feel the term “pack rat” is a better descriptor. I will be the first to admit I am something of a pack rat. ![]()
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