Thirteen months ago, when I went to the hospital to deliver the baby, among the myriad of bracelets they put on my wrist was a bright red one that said “ALLERGY”. I have a slight latex allergy; it causes my skin to get all blotchy and irritated. The red bracelet encircled my left wrist, nestled between the plastic ID bracelet with my name and my doctor’s name, and the ducky bracelet with a barcode which corresponded to an identical ducky bracelet around the baby’s tiny ankle.
During our stay in the hospital, Every time someone came to take the baby away for a weight check she would be scanned like a library book an entered into a tracking system. When she was brought back, she would be scanned, her bracelet cross checked with my bracelet and then when everything proved to match, I would sign for her. It was reassuring because I’m never at all sure I could pick my baby out of a line up. With their squishy, squinty face, and perpetually damp hair, there is something very generic looking to me about newborns. Truth be told, I feel this way probably for at least the first six months of a baby’s life.
After we left the hospital with our nameless baby, the Husband and I had a pact: the hospital bracelets would stay on until we name the baby. That took three weeks. I seem to recall that the name bracelet and ducky bracelet fell off on their own before I made the trip to Vital Records to make the baby’s name official.
The allergy bracelet, however, stayed as secure as the day they put it on me. I suppose durability is a desirable trait of a temporary allergy bracelet.
So I just… left it on.
And then somehow it morphed from something I neglected to remove into something that I was holding on to.
Every so often, someone would catch sight of the bracelet and ask, “Oh, were you in the hospital recently?”
And I would somewhat sheepishly admit, “Actually it’s leftover from when my child was born.”
I couldn’t exactly articulate why I had formed such an attachment to my allergy bracelet. I just knew that I found something comforting in its constant presence on my left wrist. Even after the red had all rubbed off and the black letters had started to fade, I would look at it and remember that quiet calm morning when my daughter was born, and the friendly doctors and nurses who welcomed her into this world.
In the 2000 movie Momento, Guy Pearce plays an insurance inspector who is unable to store short term memories and thus has to leave himself clues to figure out how to solve the central mystery of the plot. Likewise, some days I look up and I wonder how I got here – frazzled, tired, with a barnacle baby attached to me, drowning in the chaos. I look down and in this faded red plastic band around my wrist, I am reminded: “You thought it would be fun to have another kid, remember?”
Right. That happened.
At some point keeping the bracelet on became a challenge I set for myself: see how long you can cling to this last physical vestige of your last birth experience. And eventually that too slipped away and the challenge just became: see how long this one thing can remain constant in your life. Some days I would look at it with a detached, almost scientific, curiosity, as if it were another species whose lifespan I was studying.
“Does it show signs of letting go?” I would wonder to myself.
I often feel that inertia is a trait that I too easily embody, and perhaps in truth the allergy bracelet stayed on because I just didn’t bother to take it off. I had thought about taking it off for family photos, perhaps feeling a little self conscious about it, the same way I felt self conscious about taking family photos with my outgrown pandemic hair and crooked bangs I had trimmed myself. But then I realized that, actually aren’t these family photos supposed to capture the moment we are in? They are not meant to be timeless embodiments of an ideal. Let’s not try to erase or cover up the vestiges of the year we’ve lived. So I left the bracelet on.
Last week, one year and 28 days after the baby was born, I woke up and found my wrist bare, the allergy bracelet lying next to me on the bed. The plastic had finally cracked and torn. I had a brief moment of panic when I woke and it was missing, as if it were an heirloom bangle. The memories and travels that the allergy bracelet had seen in the past year are certainly priceless in its own way.
My wrist feels a little bare now. But not in a bad way. Kind of in a reborn kind of way. I’ve moved past the baby phase and am now into the toddler phase.
For now, I will tuck it in the Ziploc bag alongside the hospital bracelets of the three children, evidence of a time when they were new.