This is the baby on board tag I put on my car from even before #1 had even arrived. I had just installed my first ever car seat into the car, and I was completely gung-ho about diving head-first into dad mode, and this tag went up onto the back hatch windshield shortly thereafter.
A little after a year later, when I switched to a larger dadmobile after #2 arrived, the tag was one of the first things that went up into the new ride.
The sun has clearly faded it, and it has fallen off countless times throughout the years, but I’ve always put it back up, even as my kids went from babies to infants to toddlers to the little opinionated shits they can be today. At ages six and five, they are far from being babies, in spite of the fact that I always remind them that they’ll always be my babies, no matter when they’re 26, 38 or 45.
The latest fall off, the tag sat off the window for a little while, unnoticed, until it somehow managed to come into the house, stuck to a something that was being brought inside. I looked at it on the kitchen counter, and feeling a melancholy, bittersweet wave of nostalgia, decided that perhaps it was time to finally say goodbye to the tag, since my kids are far removed from being actual babies anymore.
#1 then looks at the tag and wistfully says I shouldn’t get rid of it, and that it should go back up into the car, just for old time’s sake.
Kid is six, she hasn’t been alive long enough for things to be old enough for old time’s sake.
But it was amusing to me that she’s clearly got this sense of nostalgia and tendency to attach emotion to completely useless inanimate objects, and it’s clear where she gets it from. And I fear for her future, because I think it’s inevitable that she’s going to develop some hoarding tendencies and have a home full of completely useless crap, because her dad fights such on a regular basis and her mom is incapable of throwing anything away, and my dad was bordering on being on Hoarders: Buried Alive based on the monumental amount of well-organized bullshit that I had to clean up from house earlier in the year.
The tag is still sitting on the kitchen counter, pending a decision, and because nobody in my household is capable of not putting all their crap on the counter or table and letting it accumulate and stack like precarious Tetris stacks. In a few days, if I’m feeling aggravated, it will end up in the trash, victim of rage cleaning at wanting to feel some semblance of order and cleanliness in my life, and I know that this is the inevitable fate of the tag, so I don’t really know why I don’t just bite the bullet and pull the trigger.
Except that I do know the answer to why, and that’s why it will be allowed to remain there until the lesser emotion does its natural order, and it’s pretty obvious where my eldest gets it from.
