It Was Never Meant To Stay
by Molly Flinkman | May 2022
Our baby crib—the one that bore the weight of all four of my babies—was recently tossed on the side of our curb underneath a pile of garbage, and I’m still not over it.
This story really starts back in the spring of 2013 when my husband, Jake, found a wooden crib on Craigslist for $25. It wasn’t white like I’d envisioned, but it served its purpose in that first nursery which had been painted gray for a baby whose gender we did not yet know. We placed a little girl on the mattress a few months later and then promptly picked her back up. It took her a while to come around to the whole “sleeping like a baby” thing, but she took to her new bed eventually as did her sister and two brothers to follow.
In total, the crib lived in six different rooms in five different homes until January 15, 2022, and the reason I am so sure of this date is because I took a picture of the crib in the light of our boys’ bedroom window just before Jake disassembled it. I stood there for one last moment alone with those wooden beams and the gray chevron sheet, and I remembered.
I remembered the way three of our kids slept—spread eagle—in the Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit. I remembered all the birthday eves I put babies to sleep only to have them wake up as toddlers. I remembered the sound of the bouncing springs beneath soft, fleece pajama pants.
If you guessed that I cried standing there, you would be correct.
The crib sat in our garage until last month when, on our city’s annual spring clean-up day, I watched Jake carry the side rails down our driveway and toss them into a heap alongside a broken sink, some grungy carpet, and a stack of cardboard.
“I didn’t realize you were going to throw the crib out there too,” I said when he came back inside, and I don’t need to tell you what happened next because of course you already know I started crying about it all over again.
I’m not sure how I would write the end of our crib’s story differently. Its arc in our family’s narrative was never meant to be a long-term role (though the fourth kid admittedly pushed its occupancy limits). The crib was never meant to stay.
I guess I just wish I could have given it a better send off.
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this need for pomp and circumstance, and I suspect you know this feeling too. It’s the moment you realize no one needs to use the hand-painted stool to reach the bathroom sink anymore or that your daughter wore her beloved white, knit sweater for the last time. It’s bare feet in an empty nursery on the day of a move. It’s a broken coffee mug on the blue laminate countertop. It’s a plastic baby spoon, hidden in the back of a drawer.
These relics hold our stories. In so many ways, they represent our growth and grief and struggle and joy, and I’d like to make a case for celebrating them—for letting ourselves feel the weight of all we have lived in the ordinary corners of our homes.
So here’s to the high chairs, the double strollers, and the cribs (even those tossed out unceremoniously). Though we practically move on from their usefulness, may we remember all they have held and honor them with the stories we choose to tell.
Love,