To call it a family heirloom might be overreach, but undeniably, its history was cool. Six kids wore the onesie for a month or two over fourteen years at the end of the last millennium. Children grow so fast in those early days, what fit last week is often stretched this week for one final wearing. So none of the kids wore it for more than two months. Strange how I remember it so well.

My brother David—a Dead Head twelve years before the Grateful Dead’s one hit, A Touch of Gray climbed the pop charts to number nine—must have found the outfit at a farmers’ market or in the window of a tourist shop in nearby Newport, Rhode Island. Or more likely, one of his friends gifted it to him, thinking “what better outfit for a newborn Cann than a tie-dyed onesie?”

Like all young parents, after getting just six or eight wearings from that outfit, David bagged the almost new garment with a dozen others in anticipation of his next child. In two years, the onesie was back in rotation for another couple of months of oohs and awws as adults gushed over the sight of his blondie baby in a tie-dye. After his second child outgrew it, David boxed and stored the onesie for five years while he and his wife deliberated over a third child.

When David’s youngest outgrew her baby clothes, he snapped the onesie along with stacks of other clothing in a few of those lidded plastic bins from Walmart that seem to line the most remote wall of every basement in America. No doubt, he wondered if his two younger brothers, already in their mid-thirties, would ever have children of their own to wear those clothes.

Yuppies, does anyone still use that term? Urban professionals often start their families late—if they ever start one at all. A surprising number of friends from my twenties and thirties never had children. I married with no intention of ever procreating, a decision that Susan never argued, unsure of her own commitment to kids. One night in my late thirties, lying awake in bed, fretting over the direction of my life, I suddenly realized that I, in fact, wanted children badly. Susan and I listed a few life goals to check off before we embarked on the business of baby-making.  

My older brother Dana made this same decision a few years ahead of me. Just like David’s kids, Dana’s two children each spent a fleeting moment of their childhood clad in that cool tie-dye. Quietly, without intention, wearing the onesie became a right-of-passage for the Cann cousins. I think the onesie served as a subconscious way for us brothers to say, yes, we’re just a bunch of suburban dads, but we still cling to our counter-culture past. Plus, it was so gosh-darn cute.

Two months before my forty-first birthday, my daughter Sophie was born. In those first couple of months, that well-worn tie-dye became my favorite outfit for her. I strolled her around town on those hot August days, dressed in only her onesie and a floppy sun hat. Smiling people offered peace signs and thumbs ups as we passed. As soon as the onesie made its way through the wash, I grabbed it from the laundry basket for another round. It’s no surprise it accompanied us on our first beach vacation with Sophie.

All our baby pictures are stored on hard drives boxed on a shelf above my bureau. If I could steel myself to dig those out and scan through a thousand pictures, I could show you a photo I took of Sophie in her onesie, sound asleep in a blanket-lined dresser drawer on the floor of our beach hotel. Later that same day we caught a ferry from Lewes, Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey for a day of sightseeing.

On our return trip to Delaware that evening, Sophie’s explosive bowel movement caught us off guard. As new parents, dealing with this toxic mess in a public setting overwhelmed us. We bungled our way through a messy diaper change conscious of one hundred imagined eyes judging us. When we returned to the hotel later that night, we realized we somehow threw away the onesie along with the soiled diaper and wipes.

Three years later, Eli started his life without the heirloom onesie. He’s the only Cann of his generation who missed out on a chance to wear it. This means nothing to him. I doubt any of his cousins even know of the onesie’s existence, and quite possibly, Susan and I are the only parents who place any importance on it.

As Sophie wrapped up last summer’s college internship supporting a census of a remote forest in northern Wisconsin, she and her teammates went to the Yeti Drive-In for a final celebration dinner. After she finished her burger, fries and milkshake, Sophie checked out the rack of clothing for sale. She found a t-shirt with a fun Yeti Drive-In logo—Bigfoot holding a hamburger and a soft serve ice cream cone. She bought the shirt for Eli as a gift for the birthday he celebrated earlier in the week. To Eli, it’s just another cool t-shirt from a place no one’s heard of. But for me, it’s a bitter-sweet reminder of fatherhood two decades ago. Eli’s new t-shirt is a tie-dye.