A Wayy Big Hoodie is just what it sounds like: an enormous three-by-three-foot poncho of a hoodie.
One of my thirteen-year-old twins gave it to me. I immediately recognized that it was a great present: it spoke to my kid’s sense of humor, his knowledge of me, that I liked to curl up on the couch in my blue fleece robe or under a blanket, that I valued ease and rest and coziness. It was a great present—but I didn’t want it.
Absurd—a giant fleece hoodie. I cringed at its cheapness, its silliness, its fadishness. Fast not-even-fashion. A $40 item that would take up a cubic foot of closet space and then wind up all too quickly in a donation box. But I love my kid, and this present was a way that my kid loved me, so I marveled and laughed a little and thanked him. Then I left the hoodie in its box.
When my kid bought it for me, he didn’t know what was coming. When I unwrapped it on Christmas morning, I didn’t either. But a little over a week later there was a rupture in our family. Suddenly it was just the twins and me and all of us were shaken, skittish, unsettled.
Then a cold front came through, and my normal robe couldn’t keep me warm. It was time.
When I took the Wayy Big Hoodie out of its box it was more like a picnic blanket than a piece of clothing. I put it on over my robe. It became a diving bell of warmth.
I was a Matryoshka doll of coziness. My resistance melted away. No chill could reach me. No challenge could ruffle me. My muscles loosed, my mind opened, and my heart did too. I praised my kid’s brilliance at giving me this wearable habitat of comfort and security. I could rest in this hoodie.
This hoodie is huge, its capacity vast. The word capacity comes from the Latin for “to hold,” and I needed to hold a lot that winter: to hold onto my family, hold back threats, hold out hope, hold it all together.
But this hoodie can hold multitudes. It’s a buffer of warmth, but also of protection—a thick layer of fleeciness between you and the outside world, an iron-colored dome of softness. A whole ecosystem of warmth and privacy. Inside this cocoon you can dissolve into a self-sludge of coziness and reemerge a different, rested, re-formed person.
Today’s weather report says another cold front is on its way. There will always be more challenges, more trials. But now I have the Wayy Big Hoodie to wrap me in its generous embrace. It reminds me that I am loved and cared for, and that sometimes, despite my resistance, comfort needs to be outsized, prodigious, even a little absurd. The Wayy Big Hoodie is big enough to take the ridicule, to show the love, to hold it all.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
