Dispatches from Babyville: It’s Never Too Cold

Seventeen years ago, I had a baby. This fall, that baby — known in these parts as Primo — is headed off to college. This major life event has triggered plentiful reflection, and even more plentiful worrying. In fact, one of things I’ve realized in my reflecting is that I haven’t stopped worrying in seventeen years. 

When Primo was an infant, I worried about too many things to enumerate. But one of the top ten, maybe even the top five, was the cold. 

Primo was born in late November, on Thanksgiving night, so his infancy coincided with the coldest months of the year. This probably wouldn’t send most new mothers into a tailspin of neuroses but what you need to know is that my grandmother is from Italy, and people from Italy have a phobia of drafts. Once, while visiting my grandmother’s family in Riccione in mid-August, my great-aunt offered me a ride to a neighboring town. I stuffed myself into her over-crowded car, the interior of which was roughly the temperature required to roast a turkey. When I asked to open a window, there was a collective gasp. 

“You’ll catch a draft!” my great-aunt exclaimed. 

And so, for the remainder of the ride, I alternated between bouts of near-vomiting and near-fainting as I was slow-broiled. I tell you this to contextualize — and yes, justify — what, in hindsight, was clearly my deranged parenting when Primo was an infant. Having been inculated with a terror of the cold by my grandmother, I would only take him out in winter after bundling him up like he was about to enter the ice planet of Hoth.

At Mommy Group meet-ups, my new mother friends would watch me peel away Primo’s layers of winter garb like they had front-row seats to Cirque du Soleil, their eyes full of wonderment. It’s fascinating to watch something being unearthed, and the more layers there are to excavate, the more fascinating it is. I carried Primo in a Baby Bjorn, pressed right up to my 98.6 degree heating pad of a body and, for maximum body warmth retention, I buttoned my peacoat around him. Once I’d unbuckled the coat and the Bjorn, I’d remove his two hats, then the spearmint-colored wool sweater and pants my grandmother had knit for him. The underlying layers — his onesie and the long sleeved jumper — could stay on him. 

Generally, I’d finish the unwrapping with enough time to nurse the baby and guzzle a cup of coffee before I had to begin the process of wrapping him back up again, for the short walk home. It was a feat of endurance, or insanity, or both. 

I bundled Primo up with such zeal that I remember being on the B63 one day, checking to make sure all of Primo’s million layers were intact when a terrifying thought occurred to me: what if I’d bundled the baby up so much, I’d inadvertently made it hard for him to breathe? Fingers shaking, I unbuttoned my coat and adjusted his head so that maximum amounts of oxygen could flow into his impossibly tiny nostrils. It was the first time — but definitely not the last — that I remember feeling caught between a worry rock and an anxiety hard place. 

At some point within Primo’s first year, my worry about the cold was supplanted with new, more urgent fears, about choking and West Nile virus and dog attacks and falls from high places and RSV and kidnapping and climate change. But life is surprising. Recently, my worry about the cold has resurfaced. I’ll defend my sanity by pointing out that Primo is going to college in the Midwest. Subzero temperatures is what that region is known for, in the same way that New York is known for pizza rats and Wall Street. 

Any time I mention my son’s college destination to a New Yorker, they’ll invariably reply, “Is he ready for the cold?” The answer is yes, my son absolutely is. I, on the other hand, am not. But of course, the truth is, I’m not ready for any of it. And it wouldn’t take Freud to guess that my overzealous quest to prepare Primo for the infamous Midwestern cold is really just my attempt to prepare him for life outside of the nest. 

When we visited the college in May, we were greeted with snow. This was deeply concerning to me, an end-of-days kind of harbinger, but the locals were not perturbed. The airport shuttle driver was the first one to utter the phrase that, I now realize, is what everyone in the Midwest says every time someone makes reference to the cold. Which is constantly, by the way. Because it snows in May over there. 

“We have a saying here,” they invariably begin. “It’s never too cold. You’re only underdressed!”

This resonated with me. It’s the exact philosophy I adhered to, seventeen years ago when I wrapped Primo in more layers than you’ll find in a mille-feuille cake. 

It’s been said that clothes make the man. This is debatable. What’s definitive is that warm clothes will make the man frostbite-proof. So, at the start of the summer, as we began college preparations, I started a Quixotic quest to find the Warmest Coat On Earth. Late at night, when my work was done and my younger kids were asleep, I listened to the sound of 1920 jazz emanate from Primo’s bedroom and was overcome with affection, worry and premature missing. And fueled by that high-octane combination, I scoured the internet to find the piece of apparel that would protect him from the perils of the Midwest. I dove deep — scuba-level-deep — into down fill indexes, rain-shedding abilities, baffling details, warmth-to-weight ratios. I updated my husband, David, as I went. 

“Now what you need to understand is that a 600 fill down coat might be enough for New York winter,” I said. “But that’s not going to keep you warm in the Great Plains.”

“It really doesn’t have to be this complicated,” David said. 

“Oh, I’m not the one making it complicated,” I protested. “I didn’t invent the Midwest weather patterns.” 

Finally, after much research, I found The Warmest Coat On Earth. I was dismayed to discover it was also The Most Expensive Coat on Earth. 

“This is half of our mortgage payment,” David pointed out. 

“But look,” I pointed to my laptop screen, where I’d pulled up a review of the jacket on my preferred outdoor gear blog. “This guy says he went snow-camping in Minnesota in January and he was almost too hot in this coat.” 

“You know Primo will be sleeping indoors, in a dorm, right?” he asked. “He doesn’t need this jacket.”

I tried to explain in a language he might understand. 

“Remember, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke Skywalker is about to freeze to death on Hoth,” I said. “But he climbs inside the dead tauntaun and it keeps him alive?” 

“Sure,” he answered. 

“This jacket is the tauntaun,” I said. 

“You,” David said. “Are losing it.” 

“You can’t put a price on saving your son from hypothermia!” I shouted.

“Apparently, you can,” David said. “And we can’t afford it.” 

In the end, reason reigned supreme. That, or my credit card limit did. Either way, I did not buy the tauntaun of jackets. We settled on a highly-rated, but not superpowered, jacket that was a fraction of the price. We got him long underwear and wool socks. For the cold, at least, he will be prepared. 

For the rest, who knows? For seventeen years, unceasingly, I have worried. In between bouts of worrying, I’ve tried to teach him things, equip him with a moral compass and good judgment, support the development of skills he would need when he was on his own one day. That day is here. I’m pretty sure he’ll be prepared in all sorts of ways I didn’t expect, and unprepared in surprising ways. I’m pretty sure I will be too. 

The one thing I know for sure sure is that when the cold comes, he won’t be underdressed.