I was at a party some months back which featured a bunch of writers. It was the end of the evening, things were winding down, and I found myself sitting next to writer Marion Winik. The two of us began talking about, of course, our children.
"Someday," I said, "I'm going to get a call from Social Services, but I swear there is something irresistible about baby butts. And not just little baby butts. Even my five-year-old's butt. She has the cutest little butt--I see it and I can't help it--I want to hold her little butt in my hands." I glanced sideways to see if I had confessed to something that would make Marion call the cops, but I was fortunate: I was talking to a fellow mom. "Yeah," she sighed. "Their little bodies are so dear."
This exchange came back to me this morning as I was going through my older daughter's bedroom on my annual Fall Cleaning Frenzy. It's one of those jobs that nobody ever sees or notices, except when it doesn't get done, and that always make me want to launch into Rant Mode--You think that drawer of clothes just bought itself, marched to our house, laundered itself, folded itself and marched up to your bedroom? Think again, sister!--but the truth is, I kind of like doing it. It doesn't rank up there with the goals I set for myself at 19--reforming the nation's penal system, writing the definitive work on Southern Culture--but it is oddly satisfying. I have my orderly piles: misplaced clothes here, giveaways there, store-for-next-year over there. And it always inspires lots of emotions. There's disgust (why do they think I'll never find the soiled underpants stuffed into the back of the drawer? Why do they do that? Why why why?); horror (in the last three months my child has outgrown everything but three pairs of jeans and all but one nice dress); delight (mates found for four socks in the Orphan Sock bag! 'ray!); amazement (some forward-thinking Mom Who Shall Remain Nameless stocked up last March on turtleneck shirts, thank yew Jesus); wistfulness.
There is something about touching the clothes of another person which brings that person to you--some tiny miracle of transubstantiation, maybe, or some alchemy of pheronomes. That was the way it was after my mother died--I still wear her pajamas to bed, because it brings her closer to me somehow. Now, folding shorts my daughter has played in, making neat piles of t-shirts, I feel my big girl's presence with me, even though her body is actually at school four blocks away. And clothes are a reminder of the humbling frailty of the human body, and how it grows, morphs, changes on a child's journey to adolescence and then adulthood. The same dresser I put her clothes in today once housed those tiny, pristine white onsies in stacks, put there by the woman who was not yet a mother for the baby who would come home from the hospital, and that seems like only about two years ago. It's been 10. What Joseph Campbell called "the temporal stream" moves faster at some periods of life than others: when I was 13, a week was an eternity, but now that I am 51, a decade seems like a week. The newborn who fit into those onesies now wants tight blue jeans with sequins and uses as much hair conditioner in a month as my husband would use in a year. And if I don't get back up there and keep sorting, she will be grown and gone before I am done.