Mary M. - PJ’s & Bathrobes - Group 3

Lamby Pajamas

O, how I loved my “lamby” pajamas with their flock of little white cotton ball lambs dancing across a pale aquamarine field of flannel.  It was a time in my life when I would indicate how old I was by holding up two fingers, a time when everything had to have a name, a time when pajamas were friends.

 

 

I sobbed when they were gone.  It was one of my earliest memories–non-verbal, and gut-wrenchingly physical.  I didn’t have an abstract category, “Things one wears to bed.” I couldn’t separate reality from imagination.  I lived in a mythical world where every thing around me was real and alive because it touched me and was part of my world.

 

 

Lamby pajamas were warm and soft.  They smelled like me, my crib, and a bit like my Mother.  They were the good part of the scary night when I had to go to sleep and it would be dark and moonlight would slice the dark (What child is afraid of moonlight?  I was) … when car lights, in dizzying yellow squares, would slide silently around the walls of the room and out the window as a car passed our house.

 

 

I was afraid of little white “eyes” of light that would lock a small, shining circle on the inside of my bedroom door, reminding me that the door was closed, reminding me it was dark.  My only comfort was my lamby pajamas.

 

 

There was no ritual for the release of the lamby pajamas, no saying goodbye.  One day they were there and the next day they were gone.  My new pajamas, striped pink summer seersucker, were stiff and crinkly and the sleeves were short.  The color was completely wrong.  Pink was my sister’s color, not mine!  I was blue. I hated them, these usurper pajamas, stiff and unloving, and I was cold in them.  My lambies were gone. I was bereft.

 

 

It was like the deaths happening in my family at that time.  Old relatives would be there and then they would be gone.  No one would tell me what happened, except to befuddle me with words that didn’t explain a thing:  “Dead.” “Heaven.”  “With God.”   Since I was afraid of God, too, that last one was not a good idea.  I simply hated the fact that things around me were there and then not there.  When I was a toddler, my Mother was taken from me, hospitalized for nearly two months during a pregnancy–there and then not there.

 

 

In my family, no one told children things.  They felt that we wouldn’t understand, that it was better that way.  But leaving a child to a lonely imaginative field of terror is worse.  As a child, I used to have nightmares where I would put the people and clothes that I loved in a dresser drawer and when I’d open the drawer they would all be gone. 

 

 

There and then not there.  Pajamas taught me about death.