Hard on a Mother's Heart

My son's closet had become stacked and stuffed with boxes and bags of baby toys and clothes too small for him. It was time. Oh, how I hate this task. But we have a garage sale in two weeks, friends who are about to have a baby boy, and a consignment sale at my son's school in six weeks or so. It had to be done.

So I started a stack of baby clothes for the garage sale, a stack for our friends, and a stack for the consignment sale. Oh yes, and I also started a stack of things which I will continue to horde, because I could not part with them. Some of these latter-stack items included the wildly expensive Strasburg Children outfits he has worn to church and such. So gorgeous, and so John-John. These were the kinds of things I used to fantasize about dressing a child in before I had a child. But some of this stack also included, to my surprise, some not-so-fine items with which I just could not part. There were some pajamas which immediately flooded my brain with images of my tiny son wearing them, smiling and laughing. It was almost as if I were trying to put part of him, part of my little boy's childhood, on a stack of things to be sold for $1 each in my yard. Perfect strangers would carry them away, unaware of the memories they held in their hands.

My eyes became moist. I started sniffing. Then I just full-out cried. Tears streaming, mouth open, like Nancy Kerrigan grabbing her knee and yelling, "Why?! Why?!" In my head, I would say things like, This is what he had on when he took his first steps. or This was a hand-me-down from my cousin and he wore it all last summer. or I remember when he used to wear this sweater to Mother's Morning Out. And the craziest one - This is what he wore the night we went to the emergency room. I certainly don't want to memorialize that, but it's part of our story, as a family. To give away his clothes makes me feel like I'm giving away part of our story. No one who picks them up for a $1 in my front yard could ever know that they hold a piece of Conrad history in their hands.

I wanted to put it ALL back in the closet. But I took a deep breath, said a prayer for strength and wisdom, and managed to clean out more than I kept. Oh, it's hard. And even I don't understand why I kept some of the random things I did. Even now, I'm tempted to go back into my garage sale bags and just make sure there's nothing else I need to keep . . .