Does this make me weird? Maybe. But my 3-year-old doesn’t think it’s weird; he thinks it’s cool. When it comes to blankies, he wants to be just like Daddy!

My blanket is about 3 feet square, white(ish, at this point), and oh-so-soft from constant wear and tear, as if a really cool guy slept with it for 12,410 nights. My mom gave it to me the day she brought my 10-pound, 9-ounce self into this world. Why do I still have it? I like how it feels, and it’s just the right size to roll up under my head so I can read comics in bed. I truly have no idea why it’s still with me; I’ve just always had it. I can tell you that throwing it in the garbage (!) would feel like killing a loved one. Not a person, I mean—more like a stomping on a gerbil you’ve had for a really long time. What kind of monster would do that?

A few days (and bites) later, constant parental self-doubt was gnawing on the bones of my certainty. I realized that any thoughts I had on the emotional implausibility of giving up a blanket were incredibly biased—they were filtered through the lens of someone who’s had his for 34 years. Maybe my son would think it was no big deal. My wife and I talked it over in bed that night and agreed we should give it a shot. If we screwed it up, it would simply be another entry in an infinite list of mistakes.