Once upon a time, long ago, my mother and I bought a few sweaters at Walmart. Nothing fancy (obviously), just some stretchy cable knits. We each got a black one and I think I got a red one, and she got a turquoise blue one. One way that I was always able to tell the difference between my clothes and hers is that she always cut the tags out of the necklines because they made her itchy. I would borrow her blue tagless sweater a lot, and eventually just never gave it back. Over time, I’ve passed on or lost the other sweaters, but I’ve had that blue one in my possession for a very long time now. It became my favorite sweater.

Then, in 2018, when I cut off all communication with my mother, a toxic narcissist, it became a sweater I hated to love. I would see it in the drawer, and it would hurt to look at it. I would wear it and feel comfortable and happy in it, and bury the pain of feeling like I could imagine wearing this sweater as almost an embrace from my mother, or the mother she was supposed to be, the one I wish I had. I would wear it and get compliments on it, and in the back of my mind I could only think about the missing tag at the back of my neck and the person who cut it out. I loved that sweater. But I hated it. For many years, I would tell myself that I should get rid of it, put it in the bags of clothes to donate and put that complexity behind me, out of my house and out of my life. Several times I nearly did, but couldn’t bring myself to do it in the end, and it would stay in the drawer, taunting me.

Over this past summer, I overhauled a lot of my wardrobe and got rid of a lot of clothing I was either no longer wearing or no longer needed. I know that I said goodbye to a number of sweaters, but couldn’t have told you which ones at this point, it was several months ago. It was a great feeling to clear out a lot of stuff!

It was not at all so great a feeling this week to go into my drawers, now that it’s finally cold enough to wear sweaters, and to discover that my most/least favorite sweater was not where I knew it should be.

In a word? Devastated. I felt devastated. I unraveled, if you’ll forgive the wordplay.

I know it’s just a sweater and there are much, much bigger problems in the world. Hell, there are much bigger problems in my own life right now than a sweater I accidentally donated over the summer. But I grieved the loss of this sweater for days. It felt stupid, but I couldn’t shake it.

The fact of the matter is, I wasn’t just grieving the loss of a sweater. I was grieving the loss of that feeling of my mother’s hug. Grieving the loss of that connection I had with her. Grieving one of the few arguably good things I could tangibly remember about her.

Rejecting connections to pure evil is easy. But also, truly pure evil is rare. Rejecting connections to a mixed bag of mostly bad that had some good in it, meanwhile, is both exceptionally more common and impossibly hard a lot of the time. My relationship, my history, my memories with my mother are not black and white, as much as I wish they were. It’s a very gray area. The sweater, although turquoise, became an exemplary symbol of that gray area. I know objectively that losing that sweater was not the same as losing my mother. But to some deep-seated part of me, it sure as hell felt like it.

I obsessively combed my way through different internet shopping options to try to find a replacement, but this was a sweater from probably almost twenty years ago, and I found nothing remotely like it. Two days after my discovered loss, I decided I’d go to Walmart (a place I rarely go to nowadays, I just tend to shop at other places) and treat myself to a new sweater that could become a new favorite. It didn’t need to be turquoise or any other shade of blue; it didn’t need to be a cable knit style. It just needed to put a smile on my face.

Well, as luck would have it, I did find a new sweater that afternoon. It isn’t the same style or color as the old one, but it’s soft and cozy and makes me smile and I like to think of it as my new favorite sweater. It’s been a few days now since I’ve had to unexpectedly say goodbye to the old sweater, and I can’t deny that I’m still hurting. But I wore the new one today and I was comfortable and happy.

What color is my new favorite sweater, you ask?

It’s gray.