by Donna Hruska

Listen to Donna narrate this story!

I gave my baby things away today. They are all gone—the crib, the bottles, the undershirts sized for a slightly over-grown mouse. A lamp disguised as a clown with a red nose and a blue lamp shade hat, an awkward spindly-legged bathinette with its wide baby strap askew, the little tray of jars holding baby powder, diaper pins, oil and lotion, the enormous diaper pail that always seemed more so on wash day—all are gone.

A mother who had to sleep with her baby for lack of another bed took the crib. The bottles, the diapers and other trappings of babyhood went to a rummage sale. Many little things disappeared gradually, put away as they were outgrown. Today, for the last time, they were unearthed and sorted. Next time, someone else’s baby will wear them.

For my baby grew into a little girl with a definite preference for patent leather shoes, uncombed hair, a dirty face and pretty dresses.

Do I mind, you ask? Not in the least. Vacations are easier now, without all that paraphernalia to carry along. Meals are more orderly. I enjoy my food hot. Without a baby in the house I can sleep later, go out on the spur of the moment, have my hair done now and then. I see mothers in the grocery stores with two or three pre-schoolers darting off in different directions, fighting over the cereal, filling the cart with unwanted junk, and I am glad I’m through with that stage of my life. Instead of babies, we have Cub Scouts, baseball players and ballerinas. It’s much better now.

Except—once in a while—when I’m feeling lonely, and no one has time to rock with me and sing “Bye-o-Baby.”

The bedrooms can finally be redecorated without those odd pieces of baby furniture that never really matched anything else in the room. After hours of work with steel wool and wax remover, I finally have the milk spots off the hardwood floors. Those long scrapes on the walls made by scooting cribs are filled and painted over. The nursery rhyme characters have been superceded by a row of American soldiers in official uniforms from 1775 to the present. I may even buy that exquisite, but fragile, white French provincial furniture—the kind with canopies and filmy bedspreads. I’m very busy being a chauffeur. There is the P.T.A., and church work and a husband to be loved and cherished. There is even a moment to myself now and then.

It’s only that sometimes, when passing down a hallway or through a crowd, that special new-baby cry reaches my ears and grips my mother’s conscience. “I’m waiting,” it calls. “Your yet-unborn, still-to-be-conceived child—your might-have-been.”

Oh, I know well we are full blessed with children. They seem to bubble from the doorways and each takes an ever widening circle of room. Parenthood is an ever increasing responsibility. There is a spirit as well as a body to be formed for we put great demands upon the young. We cannot send them out into the 1970s and ’80s half-educated, wondering who and what they are. They must be armed against drugs and disasters as well as the beckoning of aimless dissent. And there is the population problem and always, money…

I gave my baby things away today. What else could I do? But a part of me went with them.

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