Bwahhhh

It had to happen eventually, right? After 3.75 years, I'm finally getting rid of some of the clothes Maggie has outgrown. Some of the tiny stuff is going to a friend who's expecting her first daughter at the end of the month. Another friend wants to look through the 2T and 3T winter stuff for her 2-year-old daughter Sabina. Select items are being returned to the friend who handed them down to me (who just had her second daughter, a surprise baby). But most of it -- over 200 things -- were "entered" today in a local consignment sale.

That's right. I'm participating in my first-ever consignment sale. I don't know about other cities, but Chattanooga has a few really great seasonal consignment sales, and at this one, I stand to earn 70% of everything I sell. I've shopped these sales since Maggie was 10 months old, but this is my first foray into selling. And as I walked the rows hanging my items up for sale, I found a familiar lump growing in my throat.

I don't know why I'm sentimental about clothes. (Well, actually I sort of do ... it's not that clothes have any special meaning; I'm just sentimental about everything. Especially where Maggie is concerned.) When I told my friend Jessica I was keeping everything Maggie's ever worn in her professional pictures, she thought I was nuts: "Why are you keeping the clothes? You don't need the clothes if you have the pictures!!" I see her logic. But I'm still keeping them.

I've always been something of a gloomy freak when it comes to Maggie getting older and growing up. My gloom isn't super severe or serious; people on the outside probably don't even notice it. But when she turned one, I was hit with a mild funk as soon as October rolled around. This is it, I thought, the month my baby becomes not-a-baby anymore. I was dreading it. Bobby temporarily eased my mind by declaring, "She's not a toddler until she starts walking. Until she walks, she's still a baby." (This theory bought me a whole six days. She took her first step six days after her first birthday and was walking pretty confidently by 13 months.) Fortunately, my fog lifted by the time her actual birthday rolled around on the 19th.

When she potty trained, I felt sad too. It happened too quickly for me -- basically in a day -- and I didn't have time to mentally prepare myself for this huge transition. As long as she's wearing diapers, she's still a baby in at least one major way, I thought. Big-girl panties were just one more way-too-clear illustration of how much Maggie was growing up.

The funny thing is, along the way I've been melancholy (I like that word ... it just sort of rolls off the tongue) about Maggie's various milestones, yet I've discovered over and over that each new phase is better than the previous. When she lifted her arms to me, wanting ME to hold her, I rallied inside: She didn't do that when she was an infant. When her vocabularly exploded at 19 months, I loved it! She didn't do that when she was a baby. I love the conversations I have with her now. I love the jokes and the sense of humor she's developing. She couldn't do that when she took her first steps.

And so as I walked the aisles of Camp Jordan Arena today, looking for places to hang the clothes I'm selling, I gave myself a similar pep talk: I'm sad now, but every phase is better than before. That won't change just because she's almost 4. The best is yet to come. Then tough love took over: Why are you sad? Don't be an idiot. It's just clothes. Don't cry. Don't do it. Finally, I succumbed to the only rationale I knew for sure would work ...

I thought about all the cute clothes I still have at home (I didn't get rid of everything, after all), and I imagined the new things I'll buy Maggie with the money I earn at this sale. Retail therapy ... works every time.

(p.s. I'm kidding, Mom. Stop panicking.)