I don’t have a warm, fuzzy relationship with that crib, probably because I’ve had to break it down and reassemble it five times due to our frequent moves. Still, I knew it was about to be dismantled and hauled up to the attic, possibly forever, and a part of me was sad. More and more, the detritus of babyhood—the bibs, bottles, sippy cups, and onesies—is disappearing from our house, and I find myself reluctant to let it go.

It’s true, with each stage that Jessie, our second and likely our last, caps off, I feel newly free. It’s as if I’m driving cross-country and tossing the used maps of states I’ve passed through out my window—Whoo-hoo! At the same time, I’m tempted to keep that feeling of birth and newness alive—to have another baby, and another, in an attempt to keep this time of my life from ever ending.

I know. My ovaries carbon-date to the Pleistocene, and in a year or two the baby lust I’m feeling will become moot. The truth is you can’t keep any time of your life from ending, least of all this one. So, I accepted that the crib had to go, for the time-being anyway, and I was even starting to feel pretty good about it.

So was Jessie. In fact, she was taking it the way she takes everything: less like a tender little lamb than a flinty steelworker. My daughter is tough in ways I can only dream of. Where I often find myself awash in ambivalence, Jessie knows what she wants and when she wants it. So when I said to her, in a typical straddle, “After we get your big-girl bed, I’ll leave your crib in your room in case you still want it,” she yelled: “No crib! Big-Girl Bed!” 

Buoyed by her certainty, I found a yellow, cottage-style twin and set a delivery date. I bought sheets, a bright-colored quilt, and a guard rail. My husband, son, and I started talking up the bed, not sure who among us was most excited for the pending change.

Then the big night arrived, and Jessie climbed aboard her new pillow-top, shouting, “It’s so big in here!” as she manically arranged all her stuffed animals around her. Finally, I lay down and rubbed her back until I thought she was asleep, then tiptoed out of her room and closed the door. Twenty minutes later I heard her high-pitched wail. I went in and found her lying on her back just as I’d left her. The faint glow of her lamp lit her face, and I could see a glaze of tears over her big, brown eyes.

“I want to go back in,” she said, pointing to her crib, which I hadn’t gotten around to taking down.

Our little steelworker was showing a rare moment of ambivalence. She was seeing that change isn’t always easy, that sometimes we want two different things at the same time—a baby, say, and not a baby. The trick, I wanted to tell her, is keeping your head amid the chaos of all that conflict—and, at some point, making a decision to move on, no matter how hard that moving on may feel.