Six months later, the shirt was still there, having joined the permanent exhibit of precious items displayed there — a photo of my mother with our boys, my grandmother’s candlesticks, and my husband’s white polo shirt (which had become meaningful for a vastly different reason).

Doug and I, in our 10 years of marriage, had been through a lot. When I was pregnant with our first son, my mother collapsed and needed emergency open-heart surgery. The night before her surgery, I was heaving with tears, unable to catch my breath, certain she would die, and Doug, rubbing my back, assured me that everything would be fine, and he was right.

Then, at 31 weeks of pregnancy, I went into preterm labor. The night I was admitted to the hospital, a resident told me a list of things that could go wrong with my pregnancy as he looked to Doug, an attending physician at the hospital, for approval. Doug told him he could leave, and as the door shut, he told me everything would be fine, and it was. I delivered a healthy boy at 34 weeks.

When our son was one month old, Doug’s father learned he had brain cancer. Doug didn’t tell me everything was going to be fine, and it wasn’t. His father died 15 months later, at which point I was pregnant again. The last conversation Doug had with his father was when he told him that I was pregnant, only five weeks along.

With my second child, at 28 weeks, I went into preterm labor again. I stayed in the hospital for three weeks on bed rest, away from my husband and almost-two-year-old son, fearing for the life inside of me. Blindness and deafness were possibilities for him, if he even survived. But at 31 weeks, I delivered another healthy baby boy, whom we named for my father-in-law.

We had survived scares and tragedies and our marriage was stronger for it.

But that shirt.

I knew it was just a shirt. But the longer I left it there, the more it grew into a symbol of something bigger. After all, I was raising two sons, and they couldn’t grow up thinking a mother’s job was to pick up after everyone in the house. They needed to learn to pick up after themselves. They needed to learn how to deal with their own messes, big or small. I wouldn’t always be there to clean up, either literally or figuratively.