Folding Away the Tiny Sleepers

On growing up, growing older, and everything in between

I sorted through my sons dresser last night, pulling out the sleepers that don’t fit anymore. One by one, into a bin headed for the basement. Maybe for another child of ours someday. Maybe for a niece or nephew down the road. Maybe they’ll just sit down there, packed away, and never get used again. I honestly don’t know yet.

It should have been a quick job. Fifteen minutes, tops.

It took me almost an hour, because I kept stopping. Holding each one up. Remembering a specific night he wore it — a 2 a.m. feeding, a fever we watched too closely, a morning he woke up laughing for no reason at all.

It feels like just yesterday he was in newborn sizes, so small the sleeves swallowed his little body whole. Now the 18-month ones are getting tight in the shoulders, too short in the legs, and I’m standing here doing the math over and over, trying to figure out how that’s even possible. How my teeny tiny baby, the one I could hold in one arm, isn’t a baby anymore. He’s a toddler. Somehow. Already.

Somewhere between the newborn sizes and the ones he’s just now growing out of, I stopped folding laundry and started folding away pieces of a version of him I’m never getting back.

That’s the part nobody really prepares you for. Not the growing itself — you expect that. It’s the folding away that gets you. The moment after, when the drawer closes and that stage is just done, whether you were ready or not.

I don’t think I was ready. I don’t think anyone really is.

It’s not just the clothes, either. It’s him. The baby features are fading a little more each week, softening into something else. The rounded newborn cheeks. The way his eyes used to look almost too big for his face. Some of that is going, replaced by the sharper lines of a real little person, someone with opinions and a favorite way of doing things and a laugh that’s entirely his own.

But when I look closely, really closely, I can still find it. The same eyes, just more focused now, more aware. The same expressions, just on a face that’s stretched out a little. He’s still my baby under there. Just a different version of him, layered over the one before.

Watching him grow feels like two things happening at once, and they don’t cancel each other out the way you’d think they might. There’s the pride — watching him figure out how to climb onto the couch by himself, watching him get more sure of his balance every single day. And right next to it, close enough to touch, there’s this ache. Because every skill he gains is one more thing he doesn’t need me for in quite the same way anymore.

Nobody warned me both feelings could live in the same breath.

I used to think growing up was something that happened to kids. Now I know better. It happens to the whole family, all together, whether we’re paying attention or not. My parents are a little greyer than they were the day Theo was born. Lane and I are different people than we were before we had a son to raise. And Theo is becoming someone new every single week, so gradually that I only notice it in hindsight — a sleeper that doesn’t fit, a laugh that’s changed, a hand that used to wrap around just one of my fingers and now grabs my whole hand.

I keep thinking about that bin sitting down in the basement. How something so small could hold so much. Not just fabric. Nights I don’t want to forget. A version of my son that only exists now in pictures, in my memory, and now in this box that I’m not ready to close for good.

I don’t think the answer is to hold on tighter. I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. He grows anyway, boots and all, whether I’m ready or not.

I think the answer is smaller than that. Just noticing. Sitting with him a few extra minutes at bedtime instead of rushing to the next task. Actually watching him instead of reaching for my phone to film it. Letting myself feel both things at once, the pride and the ache, instead of pushing one aside to make room for the other.

Because someday I’ll pull that bin back out, whatever it’s for by then, and I’ll fold through evidence of exactly who he used to be. And I want to know that while he was that person, I was paying attention. Not just documenting it. Living it, right alongside him.

That’s the whole thing about growing up. It never asks permission. It just happens, one folded sleeper at a time.

And all we can do is notice, and love it fully while it’s still here to hold.

So I’ll hold on a little tighter.

With love,

Anna

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