At 32 years old, I have only spent a handful of nights in my life without my baby blanket.
I need to run my fingers across its stained, tattered edges in order to let the day melt away. It’s a non-negotiable bedtime accessory, my literal security blanket, the only thing that will guarantee that I peacefully and successfully slip into sleep.
Today, it’s an indistinguishable, sad pile of fraying threads that soothes and comforts me every night. And I don’t give a fuck.
Historically, I have given many fucks about every little thing in my life. I am not an easy going “no worries!” type of person. Everything is a worry, and usually a big one. I come from a long line of nervous women and this gene, mixed with my own special brand of neurosis, has made me a very self-conscious person with an abundance of fucks to give.
But insecurities around my baby blanket have never made the cut.
The lore of my baby blanket goes: my mom spent her pregnancy sewing me a sweet blanket, made with the love of a young, new mom but the only thing I cared about upon delivery was a crib set from Zellers that came with a small blanket.
I don’t know what became of the piece my poor mom lovingly stitched for months, but I do know what became of me and an emergency Zellers blankie. From the moment my little newborn fingers gripped the soft, satin edges, the sensory triggers in my brain did a dance of pleasure, and my beloved blanket became an extension of me.
The namesake for my blanket came from my early days of learning how to interpret language. My parents would tuck me in with my blanket and wish me a “Night, night!” Legend has it that my baby brain mistook “Night, night!” as the blanket, not a sendoff for sleep, and so that became her family name.
Night Night soothed every emotion entering my life from babyhood to toddlerhood to she’s-getting-a-little-old-for-this-hood.
In the late ‘90s and early aughts, I had a sick Friday night routine. After school, I went to my favourite evening ballet class. I dedicated myself to wearing my cutest and most elaborate leotards to this Friday night activity, which, at nine-years-old, felt like the chic thing to do.
Dinner at home on Fridays was typically something fantastic (pizza, Old El Paso tacos, or something else of the takeout variety), and after that I would scamper downstairs to the basement to watch my shows: a lineup of ‘90s and early 2000s programming on ABC called TGIF.
This was my heaven; a Friday night with a full belly, and a block of television to be devoured. (I have a little brother but I don’t know what he got up to on Friday nights, all I know is that he was absolutely not invited to my weekly ritual. This was sacred me-time).
At some point, between Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Boy Meets World, Night Night would make its way from behind my pillow upstairs in my bedroom and down to my basement TV party for one. Slung over my shoulder like a burping blanket, corner against my nose, I huffed that thing until ABC turned the programming over to something like Frasier and I would stumble upstairs to bed already looking forward to the next Friday.
I was a busy kid. As I got older, my schedule was increasingly packed daily with dance, piano, and acting and after a long day of being booked and busy, I craved my trusty, self-soothing buddy. A lick of the fingers against the increasingly rugged hem, a swipe of the nose from a particularly fragrant corner, a face buried in the cool, pungent fabric. Night Night was able to reset my brain from any mood straight into coolsville, lickity split.
At some point, I started to wonder if perhaps I was a bit odd.
The family joke was that I would still be sleeping with my blanket in college. Maybe it was even going to still be around by the time I was married! And what about my future children?
At every sleepover, the confirmation came that bringing your baby blanket to the slumber party was a super dorky thing to do. But I packed her anyway and I would pull her out of my overnight bag with pride, usually leaning to self-deprecating humor to diffuse the teasing. Some friends were cool with it and would show off their own bedtime companions: raggedy teddy bears, smushed old pillows and, sometimes, blankets that looked a lot like Night Night. Other sleepovers were harder. Especially as we inched into our early teens.
Night Night was repeatedly stolen and hidden. My friends shook and cackled as I began to panic at bedtime. I put on my best show playing it cool until the terror settled in and someone’s mom would get wind of the issue and tell their kid that the jig was up.
By the time I was 13, I entered most social situations feeling like a total loser: my clothes were never right, I didn’t have boobs, my hair was so curly and scrunched with crunchy, glittery gel and my teeth were unruly and massive. Strangely, having a baby blanket still on my person at the overnight event didn’t contribute to those feelings of otherness—I didn’t have it in me give a fuck about this one. I would take the emotional beating if it meant getting in a good sniff at bedtime, my face pressed against the cool, thinning fabric for a brief moment of reprieve.
When I was in my early 20s, I made a new pal in college who became a fast friend. We bonded over a lot of shared similarities: our Peruvian mothers, our love of shopping, boys, cozy movie nights in, and late nights out dancing. At our first sleepover, early on in the relationship, I unpacked my bag trepidatiously. Revealing Night Night to a new person was always a risk. She was a clean and put together person. Was my blanket going to screw this new friendship up!?
“Hey girl, I have something to show you,” I said, nervously. “I, um, still sleep with my baby blanket and it’s kind of… ugly.”
Then, one of the most profound moments of my life happened. With a timid smile, my friend reached behind her pillow and pulled out what can only be described as an ancient rag.
“I have one too!” she squealed. “I call it Noni!” We collapsed on her bed, cackling so loudly her mom came in asking “que paso!?” while we giggled and giggled, and shared our new sacred intimacy: a meeting of the beaten up baby blankets.
Sleepovers in this era leveled up. If we were together at one of our houses, we were free to be absolute freaks. Watching movies on our overheating Macbooks, we cozied up with our blankets stuffed under our chins, completely content with our sensory needs met, and blissfully unbothered that this was semi-bizarre behavior for two 20-year-old girls who could be doing literally anything else.
Admittedly, Noni had a certain je ne sais quoi to it that Night Night didn’t have with its mouthful of a name. And during that season of life, as my friend and I molded into singular entities, so did our raggedy nonis.
In my 20s Night Night/Noni came with me to camping music festivals, traveled with me on a solo year in Latin America—thriving in multiple hostels, in many different countries, with hardly a wash to her name.
Actually, that isn’t true. The housekeeper at the place I lived in in Lima washed it in the washing machine “by accident” once. It was a heartstopping scene, as Night Night wasn’t up to weathering anything more than delicate hand wash at this point.
Someone told me it looked like an ejaculation rag.
Night Night survived a string of terrible boyfriends, a summer backpacking Europe, and my first live-in partner. And still, I had no fucks to give…at least not where the blanket was concerned. Night Night held me through the first quarter of my life—dried lakes of tears, endured many stifled screams of sadness and frustration, comforted me through intense summers at ballet camps, and brought me down to earth from moments of panic. I truly didn’t care if moving in with a boyfriend meant generally giving up things like security blankets. This was my only modicum of self-care.
When you still tote around such a thing in your 30s, the tone changes from disgusted to nostalgic. Friends will often ask if I still have it, and politely disguise their horror when I show them what is now an unrecognizable lump of threads. When I still lived at home, my grandma would ask to see it during a visit, and I’d pull it out from behind the pillow and we’d laugh hysterically at the sight of it.
“When are you going to give up that thing?!” my mom would say, half-exasperated, half-teasing.
“Never” was the only answer.
It turns out, Night Night did make it to my wedding night. She caused quite a ruckus, actually—I misplaced her in my night-before suite and sent the Oak Bay Beach Hotel staff on a wild goose chase searching for it.
I stood in my wedding dress and “Just Married” embroidered jacket, wild-eyed and panicked, staring as my exhausted newly titled spouse made the call down to the concierge.
The conversation went something like this:
“Hi, um, my wife, she has a…uhh… baby blanket. Yes, a blanket from her childhood. She was staying in suite 401 last night and now she cannot find it. Is there any chance a housekeeper mistook it for a…rag? And maybe threw it in the laundry? Or…the garbage? Sorry, yeah, she’s really upset. Yes, our wedding was lovely, thank you.”
“Of course, Mr. McPherson. I understand, I’m sorry. This…childhood momento…this blanket…What does it look like?”
(The look on this man’s face having to describe a tattered piece of cloth to a 5-Star Hotel Concierge on behalf of his wife of like eight hours…cinema!).
Oak Bay got to work looking for Night Night and we continued the incredibly sexy wedding night tradition of looking for the thing I absolutely cannot sleep without. It was found in someone else’s bag (suspicious!?) and my husband made a comically relieved call down to the concierge so that they could stop their hotel-wide search.
It’s a story that I will never live down.
Those with adult pacifiers will understand that these kinds of stories go on and on and become embedded into relationships. Whether you had a thumb sucking situation or a decrepit teddy bear that made it all the way to college, sometimes, all we had were our silly little coping mechanisms. Our tiny, personal rebellions guarding us against the sensory blowout of life.
My relationship to this blanket is my little fuck you to the pressure of growing up.
As I creep into my mid-30s, I am worn down by the obnoxious ticking of my biological clock. The thought of birthing children terrifies me and most days I am content with the idea of sparing another individual the horrors of simply existing on earth.
But I hope that if I do one day bring another person into the fold that they find something soothing to hold on to—even if it’s a piece of fabric that feels cool against their cheek.
And I hope that they cling to it for as long as they need to. And that when someone inevitably belittles such a habit that they have the profound courage to say “fuck it.”
