How Can You Love a Stroller?

...and then, finally, let it go.

You can listen to an audio version of this essay above!

---

I don’t remember how or when we knew we were ready.

Somewhere between the purchase of our first home, quitting my supposed-to-be dream job, trips to Germany, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and Italy, and refinishing our hardwood floors, we’d reached a mutual understanding that our next adventure would hopefully be having a child.

Soon enough, the adventure was forthcoming, and we needed a stroller to match.

We shouldn’t have had the means, back then. And yet, confidently we walked into REI on an afternoon in May with our annual members coupon in hand. It was a warm, sunny day with the cicadas pulsing in the treeline behind the strip mall, matching the buzzing energy of our first big baby purchase. It felt good to take some of the cash we’d been stowing away just for this kind of thing.

A we’re starting a family kind of thing.

We picked the orange one. It matched our twin kayaks, our well-loved two-person tent, our wedding colors, us. And it didn’t hurt that we’d be easily seen by cars passing by in the little, sidewalk-less neighborhood we called home.

For months, it lived in a box stored in the room that would eventually, with painstaking care, become a nursery. Oh the places you’ll go, I’d think, dreaming in whimsical colors and wonder at the life growing inside of me and the one changing before our very eyes.

But there were fearsome days, too: dark ones coursing with what lived in the recesses where I dreaded what we might lose and how I’d be found wanting. What would happen to what we’d built of two? Would I be an able mother? Where would the woman I was go when she became someone else?

Becoming a mother was a dream I’d always had and deeply feared, with equal measure. It’d be a long time before I’d understand why.

---

I’d never been much of a runner, except on the soccer field. This belief was the result of elementary years spent as the “chunky” girl grabbing two straws instead of one for every lap around the baseball field during the Mile Run of the annual Presidential Fitness Test. Even still, I came in last, my cheeks flushed red, panting, thighs chafed uncomfortably.

Even later, unhealthily living in a smaller body, I loathed the idea of it.

But in college, when I met Cliff, who ran cross country in high school, attended the United States Military Academy for a couple of years, and readily volunteered for mission trips in Honduras, I learned to face my limiting beliefs about myself and what I could do with my body out of doors.

Together we took up hiking, camping, kayaking, and I even found myself later training, happily, for actual, honest-to-God races that involved running.

With him, adventure became a way of living. Of saying yes to what hadn’t seemed possible for me because with him by my side, everything was.

Even and especially, becoming a mother.

---

One night we sat in what was now our daughter’s finished nursery, a month or so out from welcoming her there. While I reclined in the spring green glider in the corner, he sat on the floor, assembling the stroller, making me laugh while feigning difficulty. It was nothing like the IKEA furniture he’d built for us earlier a few months back, but it was one of many things he’d been putting together for all of us that year.

The crib. The suitcase side table. The floating bookshelves. My courage.

Once she arrived, I was a baby wearer to the core, my girl wrapped tightly to my chest, our hearts finding each other’s rhythm on the regular. But what this stroller gave me, early on, and continued to do for many years to come, was to push me onward.

It helped, when I was paralyzed by postpartum mess in the dead of winter, to move. To be with her and to, at the same time, have space in my own body, the smooth cadence of forward motion almost anywhere I could take us.

The mall. The friendly streets of our historic downtown. The four corners of our small neighborhood that became my daily track. The park on a sunny last day of the biggest year of our lives besides the one in which we married.

And it’s taken us so many other places, since, even after its younger double version joined our family for its own duration, one easier to part with a few years ago.

The stroller’s last voyage was to Walt Disney World in 2021, and from that whole entire trip, it only appears in one photo. The same cannot be said about any of its previous adventures. This time, we’d brought it more as a precaution than a necessity and knew, even then, that it had served its purposes.

I wasn’t ready, though, to let go.

This stroller, which had helped bridge the speed of the woman I’d learned to become with the one she was growing into, meant more than even I realized. In a moment, wheeling it from the garage to the front porch where it would await its buyer after living untouched for over three years, I was steeped in an overwhelming flood of nostalgia.

When I most felt like I couldn’t, this stroller reminded me I could.

It carried all three of my babies, and it also carried me.

And while I will be, forever and always, beyond thankful for that, it’s now another mother’s turn to feel her wings unfurl with her hands on the soft foam and the pavement beneath her feet, small toes peeking out beyond the canopy.

“Enjoy the adventures,” I said, my throat closing again over those words, the memories, and a new wave of tears creeping up.

I know I did.

---

Thank you for reading (or listening!).

I’ve only ever recorded poems, to date, but this felt… right.

Thanks for giving me space to share.