I’ve had a baby blanket since I was…well, a baby. It’s white with red trim and has the remnants of some long-ago washed out image of Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Circus. I no longer need a security blanket to comfort me while I sleep, or protect me from the boogeyman, but I can’t bear to throw it away or pack it into some box to be eaten by moths and slowly disintegrate over time. Today it still sits on my bed, proudly serving the useful function of keeping my head from sliding off of my satin pillowcases into some jarring position in the middle of the night.
Technically, it’s my second baby blanket. When I was born I “inherited” my first blanket from my older sister, by which I mean my parents bought her a new one and convinced her it had super powers that the old one didn’t so she wouldn’t get jealous of the baby having a blanket of her own. That attempt of my parents to assuage my sister’s feelings haunted me for years as my sister would run around the house with her blanket as a cape saying I couldn’t play superhero with her because my blanket “wasn’t special”. Granted, when I received the thing it was tattered and contained a lovely coffee stain on the bottom corner, but as long as I wasn’t being carried off in the middle of the night by those furry things from Where The Wild Things Are I figured it was doing its job just fine.
After a few years, my mother decided that the lovely and familiar piece of fabric that I was dragging merrily behind me had reached the point of being dispensable, and as I think in hindsight about the giant gaping tear in it I think she might have been right. At the time, however, nothing would part me from my blanket. Zeus himself could have thrown lightning bolts at my feet and that frilly-looking man from the fashion network who used to give me nightmares could have chased me in those stiletto boots of his but I would still not have relinquished it. My mother bought me a brand new blanket (which had a strange way of mysteriously walking itself into the freezer or trashcan in the middle of the night), she brought me new stuffed animals in the hopes that I would hug them at night instead (I ended up sleeping in a menagerie of fluff-filled friends, I don’t think my back actually touched mattress for months), and even resorted to stealing my blanket and chucking it into the dumpster outside. Yet every night without fail there it would be by my pillow, waiting to protect me from the dark and smelling slightly of the meatloaf we ate the night before.
For a while, it became routine for my mother to take me out shopping on Saturdays through baby stores and children’s boutiques. It was that time in my life when I was rapidly growing out of every piece of clothing I owned so it wasn’t as if we didn’t have reason to shop, but I’m fairly certain that a main purpose of these trips was to find something that I would accept to replace the blanket which was, by that point, in two distinct and separate halves.
Now I would like to take a moment in this story to note that my mother is infinitely patient with me and truly deserves some sort of velvet-mounted medal for all of the wonderful nonsense I’ve inflicted on her through the years. She tried several times to sit me down and explain that it wasn’t that she didn’t want me to have the blanket, it’s that it simply wasn’t healthy to keep the molding old thing around. As an adult I can look back and admit she was right, but at the time all I heard was “Blah blah blah Heather blah blah throw out the blanket blah blah.” There may or may not have been more blahs. My memory isn’t flawless.
However, on one miserably cold Saturday morning (I remember because I was wearing three layers of coats) mom and I went into this off-the-main-road mom and pop run antique store. My mother insists that the purpose of that outing was to replace parts of the Tiffany-style lamp that our dog had broken for the fifth time by racing through the house at breakneck speed until he slammed headfirst into a wall- the same wall he had hit four times previous - but judging by the fact that I was the only one of her three children she brought in tow I’m thinking she had some mom-sense that we would finally find what we were looking for. The store was really an old Victorian-style house that had been converted, and after dusting snow and damp off of our clothes we moved from the foyer to what was once the dining room. There it was, hanging stretched across two chairs for display, a perfect, brand-new replica of my blanket!
I remember making a noise somewhat like a small pig who’s discovered its curly tail has been set on fire before leaping over an antique coffee table to hug the thing. It was the blanket as I had never had the opportunity to see it: Raggedy Ann’s face still had color, Andy’s face hadn’t been scratched out by a blue crayon, and the Circus performers hadn’t been washed out to the point where they were no longer discernible from the train on which they sat. If my memory is correct, my mother grabbed up me and the blanket with one arm and went marching straight to the cash register where the grinning saleswoman was forced to ring up the item manually because I would not remove my vice-like fingers from it. We then went home, abandoning the lamp-bits in a fit of jubilant celebration and singing with the radio at the top of our lungs.
When we arrived home, my mother marched up to my bedroom, retrieved the old blanket and, in an epic triumphant fashion, dropped it into the kitchen trash…
…Where it stayed for about five minutes before I sneakily ran it back upstairs. It took her two months to finally throw it away (she found my secret hiding place while I was at school and actually drove it away from the house to find a dumpster) but thankfully by then I had grown sufficiently attached to the new one and I didn’t fight it…too much.
I’ve taken much greater care of the second one, and even now more than a decade later the design can still be seen, which is good considering the design is retired and there won’t be another opportunity to make a switch ever again. To be honest, I would never make another change - my blanket is one of the few things in the world that I know is unequivocally mine, something that no one can ever take from me. It’s a rather comforting thought.
Speaking of comfort, I think I’ll go take a nap.
