if you don't know what a Grateful Dead cd cover can smell like then you probably won't want to read this post

Alternate Title:
how I came to nurse my babies in an old Ikea chair for university that smelled like a Grateful Dead cd cover

Because that is what happens when you blow out your asshole, pushing a nine pound baby into this world all hopped up on an epidural you totally hadn't planned on getting, so you can't really feel how hard you're pushing and because sitting on the lovely oak rocker gifted to you by your mother-in-law feels like your holding a sandwich baggy of hot coals, the red glowy kind at the bottom of campfires, between your bum cheeks.

So you can see how obviously necessary it was to drag up the old Poang chair from the basement where it had been retired with the lava lamp and the lucite coffee table. You know because of the hot coals. And 16 months later when my asshole went back to its congenial self, the Poang remained. My perch through hours of nursing, and bouncing, and soothing. A staid presence in both my kids' nurseries. Its where I sat humming softly to both my newborns, taking them in, kissing their soft heads, whispering into their tiny ears. Its where we first met, where we first became acquainted.

I mean, there are certain moments as a parent where you expect the heartache, the overwhelming emotion. First steps, first words, first day of school, graduations. All these Hallmark moments, you prepare yourself for, you're ready for the tears, the trepidation. You steel yourself to these times, gird your loins if you will.

And so I was as surprised as anyone when over this past week, moving my daughter into a big girl bed and removing the last vestments of her nursery, that moving the Poang chair back down to the basement was so fucking hard. Like sitting-in-her closet-in-a-pile-of her-old-baby-clothes-ugly-crying hard. My husband just shakes his head, understanding of my idiosyncrasies.

I peer from the top of the stairs at it, alone in the dark, and I feel sad. Because that chair, sitting in my basement, will take on a new smell, of what I don't know. But I will never sit in it nursing a newborn. My newborn. That chair will never smell like baby, my baby, again.