I spent a good portion of last night rocking a sleeping Blythe in my arms.
It’s interesting, what will run through my mind in the middle of the night, while I’m half asleep and being snuggled by a warm kid.
We have two, two-pronged towel hooks hanging on the wall just outside of our shower. One is taller than the other, and maybe I should just go take a picture so you can see for yourself but I did just mention that I was up most of the night and I don’t really feel like working that hard right now, so close your eyes and imagine two towel hooks on a wall.
Except, don’t close your eyes, keep reading.
Anyway, when we moved in here, Jeremy claimed the taller hook and I claimed the shorter one. It makes sense – he’s a full 7 inches taller than me.
Last night I was thinking about how those towel hooks are like our lives. Back then, our towels could stretch out and dry quickly, pursuing their own interests but still close enough to know exactly what was going on in the other towel’s daily life. Close enough that my towel could let his towel know if it was starting to smell mildewy, let’s say, and also close enough to snuggle when they were feeling frisky lonely.
These days, our towel hooks are pretty crowded. Blythe keeps a hooded bunny towel in there, Alison keeps a yellow ducky towel. Sometimes they want the bunny and the ducky to dry together, so my towel ends up all squished into the wall, and Jeremy’s towel is too far away to let it know if it starts to get stinky.
Sometimes, when I get out of the shower to reach for my towel, I find that it has been knocked to the floor and is not only still damp, but is also covered in cat hair and pieces of hay. Then I have to run across the bathroom naked to get a fresh towel, and of course one of our employees always happens to be walking by the window at that very moment.
Other times, each of our hooks shares a spot with an animal towel, but ours are always pressed to the outside, the bunny and ducky tucked in between. Our towels can shout to each other across the divide, but no doubt the moment they begin to speak, the duck will start quacking and the bunny will start hopping.
A few weeks ago, my hook just fell right off the wall. Maybe its load was too heavy? Who knows. It was quite inconvenient. All four of our towels cannot fit on Jeremy’s towel hook. So we had to outsource. One went to the hanging bar across the bathroom, another went on the bar on the outside of the shower door.
But it was sad, seeing all of our towels so far apart. They’re like a family, those towels.
So Jeremy fixed it, and I lovingly arranged the towels, just so.
It’s OK that my towel doesn’t always get dry.
It’s OK that sometimes, my hook holds the majority of the household towels.
It’s OK that the ducky and the bunny can be pushy, loud, and obnoxious at times.
Because, when it’s the middle of the night and your baby girl is asleep against you, those towels remind you that your family is together and happy.
Even if we do occasionally smell like mildew.
