The Nightgown

Your fibers have worn too thin for me to repair your tear, the tear that began tiny from tiny hands grabbing at you in search of the breasts you covered. That tiny tear has grown, just as the tiny hands have grown and I have had no control in stopping any of it.

I wore you first on my wedding night, in a tent, in the woods, and you smelled of smoke from the fire that kept us warm. I was wearing you that following morning too, when my first child was conceived.

For nine months you covered my growing belly and my husband teased us both. You were there that first night home too, when I was so tired and sore and terrified, terrified that I did not know anything about being a mother to the child that cried in our arms. I was wearing you when the breast milk I'd waited five days for soaked the front of you. I laughed and laughed a nervous laugh because what strange things my body was capable of!

When my father left this world and I was too sad to get dressed, I wore you for a week, finding comfort in your softness and your smell. You smelled like the baby boy who was always tugging at you and burying his face into you, holding tight to you, to us, with his whole body.

I was wearing you when my second child was conceived, too. And again on that morning when I realized what had happened, that despite a marriage failing already, I was again with child because one night I'd needed to feel something but grief, anything.

Another winter and spring passed with you and then came summer and a baby girl. I'd argued with the nurses the day she came to let me up to have a shower and you. And so they did, with supervision, an hour after giving birth.

Three days later and back home, again you were soaked with milk from my own body, milk made special for that little girl. I laughed again because it never stops being amazing what a woman can do. As recently as this morning that baby girl clung to you and I, tugging at your tear. How something so thin could provide such a warmth, I do not know but we were both especially grateful on this cold November morning.

You are just a thing, nightgown, and I've been told not to love things in this world, told to save my affection for the living. But you are alive to me. And since I could never toss a living thing into the trash to be carted away to a hole in the earth or to a fire in the sky, I will tuck you away with the other things I've been told not to love. Into a drawer devoted entirely to secret and wonderful 'things' for me and me alone so that they might be pulled out from time to time, to be held, to be smelled, to be remembered.