Blanket Love

When I was a very small, very red-headed child, my lovely mother made some yarny needle-pointed crafty thing for my bedroom wall.  It was Linus from the Peanuts.

See, I was very much a Linus Child.  I had a beloved and confidence endowing blanket of magical powers.  So magical, in fact, that I carried that blanket with me everywhere until Kindergarten when my lovely mother refused to let me carry the ragged thing in to school with me.  I slept with it until I was in Junior High (and I am not ASHAMED!  Junior High is HARD!  and MISERABLE!  And anything you cand do to aleviate that pain, you do it!).  I still have it packed away as part of my Unimaginable Misery Contingency Plan.

Once the Boy came along, I started carrying a blanket again.  This time it was his, not mine.  When he was small and new, we tried out different blankets, different fabrics, textures, prints, sizes, and colors.  We figured out pretty quickly how much he loved  his Aunty Lisa Blanket, it was the one thing that would calm him when almost nothing else would do. 

Then we had a few months there where, if we were out and about and he had ME, well then, he didn't need nor particularly want his blanket.  But now?

Now, I'm starting to realize that my child may look like his father, but he has his mother's eccentric personality.  I'm in my 30s and back to carrying a blanket everywhere we go.  And I do mean EVERYWHERE.  Running to the bank to go through the DRIVE THROUGH?  Blanket!  Walmart or Target?  Blanket!  Church?  Blanket!  And it goes without saying that if he is going to be sleeping anywhere at anytime the blanket is the MUST HAVE accessory.  Bad day?  Blanket on the head!  Good day?  Blanket in hand and laughing!  Blanket at breakfast!  Blanket at noon!  Blanket after bath while naked as a jay-bird!  It's all about that 36 inch piece of soft white synthetic fabric.

But you know?  I can do this.  This?  This inexplicable need for this one soft thing?  This urgent LOVE for an inanimate object?  This inarticulatable WOE if the blanket is GONE (read: in the washer because it STINKS).  I understand this.  I know this.  I can handle this.  And if I were being really honest, I love this.

I told Chris the other day, when the Boy outgrows his blanket, that's the one thing from his childhood that I want.  I want to pack it away in cedar so that when he is grown and gone and no longer needs me, I can pull out his blanket and smell what he smelled like when he was small and his face just fit in the crook of my neck.  It will be the one talisman that I hold on to, in order to remember this time when it was him and me and me and him and time was fleeting but life was Grand.