Our stroller is a memory now

As we drove back from a rather long day of grocery shopping today, I saw a man folding his baby’s stroller, and tossing it in the back of his car. There was no emotion attached to this act. This must just be another day in his life when he brought his kid back from somewhere, and the stroller’s job is done for the day. We drove down few more minutes, and I noticed a lady, a young mother, must be in her early twenties, pushing the stroller in her workout clothes. She arched to take out something from underneath the stroller - a towel, it slipped and fell from her hand. I wanted to watch her pick it up, but we fled past this scene, faster for me to have watched the act getting completed. 

On a normal day I would have walked past these scenes. These mundane activities hardly deserve a second glance - jobs that look like a leaf out of every parent’s life that go round and round in circles.

But not today. Today was different.

I will tell you why. But first let me take you to that very spot where our hearts - mine and my husband’s - let out a tiny shriek! It sank deep in the bottom of my tummy, and took more than usual time to come back to where it normally sits - in my brain.

This was the Easter weekend. And after having chucked many plans on how to spend this precious weekend of three days, we concurred over the thought of taking a step back and just relaxing at home. Both me and the husband needed doing this, considering the good number of things relating our home that needed our immediate attention. This is a treat to my OCD-ed soul, it meant list, list and more lists. And just the thought of striking each one of them after the tasks have been accomplished makes my heart flutter. Then it was just a matter of listing the to-dos and heading to the shops (ya we are still very old-fashioned that way), and numerous other stops to meet other odds and ends. But only if the Tampa traffic slowed down to make way for us like it would for an ambulance! Huffing and puffing, finishing my chores, dragging all three of us, we rolled inside the car - our destinations planned as per my list. Costco-Walmart-Target-Publix-Lunch. This is what the simpler version of the list looked like. How difficult is that to achieve, right?

We found a spot at the parking lot infront of Costco easily, and merrily tumbled out of the vehicle – the toddler still keeping pace with us, perky and happy since the day had only begun. All good signs so far, thank God! A cross baby with bulging bags of grocery is the last thing you would wish for over a weekend like this. The husband flexed his arms to open the trunk now to pull out the stroller. A task he does so perfunctorily, that mostly he’s not even looking while reaching out for it. But today as he stretched to fetch the stroller, he paused and froze for good few seconds. Looked bewildered. Then realization hit him like a ton of bricks. And his crestfallen face turned towards me. And what he uttered thereafter, changed what the day looked like to me few minutes back.

“The Stroller!”

“What do you mean the stroller?”

“It’s not here”
"What do you mean it's not here?" "Where did it go?”

Now I know that merely repeating lines wasn't doing any help. I also know that the stroller can’t take a stroll on its own. But we say these things as fillers - when our brain is not synched with the happenings and it goes on these brief moments of lapse.

“Shit! What! Did we misplace it?”

“Whaaaaat!!!?”

“Whaaaaaaaatt??!! How!! Where!!”

For the uninitiated, in a parent’s life, during the early years of their child, this thing called the stroller, also known by other names such as pram, perambulator, baby carriage (archaic),  holds a place that only a person who has been in our situation can fully fathom. Before this day, we had ‘almost’, left it behind only a couple of times to our credit. No, to my husband’s credit to be fair. Our duties are very strictly divided, and I refuse to take any pride at turning into a super woman by choosing otherwise. He is wholly and solely responsible for the stroller, because you can only focus on one thing at a time, and also since turning muscular doesn't tempt me enough, I chose the baby. But don’t get me wrong, I am not getting into a dirty blame game here, infact I was the one who happened to utter:

“How can ‘we’ be so irresponsible!”

To which he responded as:

“Not us. ‘Me’! It was me!”

Hah! That’s it! Poor soul had no idea what sinister turn this innocent submission could take. How this would be saved for the bigger battles, and slammed on his face when he would be least prepared for it. That’s the thing about men. They have a knack for saying things that are most dangerous for their situation, yet, they never learn! In a matter of seconds, I washed my hands off from all responsibility. And the damage this was going to incur, which was going to be immense I could tell, was to be hurled upon him. I could now breathe easy and some of the guilt that was weighing on me was taken off instantly. But the pain of now having to carry around baby in our arms, or coaxing her to sit on the trolley was a lot to bear with.

We ransacked our brains and made a mental map of all the places we had visited the previous weekend, which was quite a few. We had been to places where we wouldn’t go on a normal day. Places such as, home solution shops, no, not for furniture shopping or kitchenware, but for some freaking frames! Picture frames! Good Lord! Then we had made errands to the kid’s pediatrician, then the usual suspects – Walmart, Target, kid’s play arena and a couple of quick stops here and there. That was an overwhelming number of places. “Where do we begin?”  

Problem is, your brain, in such situations, scans through everything so fast that it all disappears in a blur. We did, what any normal person by common standards would do -  track ourselves back to the last time we remembered using it. If you are wondering at our stupidity of even making an attempt to find it (after a week), let me tell you, this blind faith is based on some surprisingly good experience we had had with misplaced things in the recent past. Okay now stop pursing your lips, we are good as long as our kid’s name doesn’t get announced in a shop’s lost and found. Rest can be handled.

So starting our hunt from this point, we made it to the first suspects first, and were met with disappointment. No, they hadn’t found a stroller that had soft pink floral lining and that folded like a dream. Husband could do it even in his sleep! And to think of how much practice it took in the initial days. The next stop also left us with a heavy heart, they found two strollers, but not the one we were looking for. Adding insult to our injury, the lady at the counter asked whether the baby was not forgotten with the stroller. Since this was not our day, we decided not to take her up on this, and quietly made our exit like soldiers who have lost their battle.

In this rigmarole, the only silver lining was that our girl was actually quite done with the stroller. She is in that stage where they think they can conquer the world on their tiny feet, and hence vehicles of transport are to be kept at a safe distance. We were already going to replace it with an umbrella stroller – the less bulkier, lighter version of the original one. This kind makes them feel freer I believe, to suit their playfulness at this stage. Anyway, when we eventually realized that we were hoping against hope, and the best thing to do after arriving at this point is to resign to our fate, I did blurt out the most abused line in such situations:

  “May be it is a sign, may be it is time to move on.”

It was an exhausting day to say the least. But tiredness was more in our minds. I however made peace with the fact that it’s gone now. And consoled myself saying that at least we lost it in a favorable time. It would have been nice to have been able to nurse its numerous dents and marks, and cleaned and tidied it up to be rested in storage. Alas, that did not happen. My only regret would be that I couldn’t give our beloved stroller a respectful goodbye, couldn’t ask the daughter to enjoy her last ride in it with its awareness. Come to think of it, it’s only a ‘thing’, it can be replaced, I know that. But I wonder if the memories we had made in it, the miles our kid had covered in it, the difficult terrains it had withstood, will still be the same.