The Lamb
This ceramic lamb was a birth gift, or so I’m told. I don’t remember that part. I just know it was always in my room. For a long time I didn’t even know why or question that it lived on top of my dresser. Somehow it escaped being broken even in a house with six children. Probably because none of us liked it much? I certainly had no desire to play with it or interact with it.
Once I understood that it belonged to me, that it was an object with a story, (“This was given to you when you were born” is a short story, but still a story) I was then empowered to make choices about the fate of the lamb. I think I first gave it away when I moved across the house from my childhood bedroom into my teenager space. Might have been sooner than that. I know that I gave it away when I moved to go to college, and again when I got married and my mom handed over boxes of stuff stored at her house. I kept putting it in donation boxes. Yet the next time Mom would have a pile of stuff for me, the lamb would be there.
I’ve decided the lamb is haunted. Not in a perilous way, but more like a guardian spirit gifted to me at birth. Obviously the lamb is not saving itself from donation. It requires a host, my Mother, to save it over and over again. And she does so automatically, rescuing it from donation because it represents something. A moment, a memory. Or perhaps the lamb compels her. Out of the donation bin and into a box intended to be given to me. I do think Mom loves the moment when I say “Wait, we still have this thing?” She gets to feel as if she salvaged family memory and history from being lost.
And so I am here at age 53, helping my parents clean out their house. And the lamb is here. It is in the box of things Mom is handing off to me. Probably the last such box I will get. Because we’re scouring all the corners of this house and Mom isn’t keeping things for anyone else anymore. The lamb will go home with me. And now I get to choose. Again, whether to donate it from a place where Mom can’t rescue it.
Here is the thing, I always feel vaguely guilty when I decide to let it go. When something persists in your life it gains resonance and emotional weight. This lamb has been hanging around forever. I have to decide whether to sever that connection. The moment I succeed in donating it, the lamb no longer has its story. It is just a ceramic lamb from the 1960s. Basically valueless. And I will never again hold it and say “we still have this?”
Or I could type up this story and tuck it inside the lamb. Then let it linger on a shelf in my house, watching over me. I would become its new host, saving it from donation. I still don’t like it much, it was never my style.
I’m honestly not sure what I plan to choose for this.