Christmas of my eleventh year I asked for a stuffed animal. Specifically a grey donkey. I remember getting in bed that night, and my dad coming into my room to say goodnight, asking me what I would name it. We often played name games. Dad is the one who named our cat Hamilton. The donkey arrived with the name Molly on its tag, but we weren’t sold. While she has had many names over the years, Molly is the one that stays. 

Before Dad left my room that night, we talked a bit about growing up, but not in a way that was as significant then as it is in retrospect. Many of my conversations with him were like that. He planted seeds for me to savor later, for example: “we don’t really ever know the inside of someone else’s relationship. Only the people in it do.” And “you need to realize that you and your mother don’t think the same way.” Gifts I still take out and unpack in the twenty-seven years since he departed.

On Christmas night 1980, I said something like, “I know, Dad, I’m kind of old to have asked for a stuffed animal for Christmas, but I really, really love her and I will keep her a long time. Thank you.” I remember how soft Molly’s fur was in the beginning, how she could snuggle in right along my belly and calm me like a hot water bottle. I was also shy about how much I wanted that comfort.

Just over two weeks later, on January 12, my parents and I went to the theatre in San Francisco to see Richard Burton in Camelot. I went to the ladies room before the show began and experienced a wave of bone-chilling fear. “Mommie,” I called desperately out to the stall beside me, “I’m bleeding.” I heard the sound of disembodied laughter from outside the metal walls.

This was a time before Advil was OTC. We learned quickly that I needed support for my pain with a prescription of Motrin. It was a shameful secret to hold in sixth grade, and Molly held my tenuous space between childhood and adolescence. She often dried my tears.

She came with me to boarding school, but I left her at home for college. 

*

Then one freshman night, I had a few beers with friends at their five-man suite, a favorite place to be that year. One of the guys had a land-line he let us all use. (This was back when we paid for every call.) I sat down and dialed my parents, the din of partying nearby. They both got on the line. Hearing my dad’s voice always made me feel like home. We talked for a while, and then I asked: “I was wondering. Could you send Molly?” 

She remained with me for my four years in New Jersey. Then X and I got engaged, and she was on or near our bed in the various apartments we had in San Francisco and Los Angeles, often calming my stomach when I needed it, but sometimes set aside. She snuck through as most of my other stuffies found their way to other homes. We bought our first house and again she came along. 

As we worked on renovating the house, I was trying to get pregnant. We tried off and on from the start of our marriage until we went to a fertility specialist. Nine years later, I got pregnant with injectable drugs and insemination. 

*

Twenty years ago today, February 22, I was not feeling well despite being in my second, “safe” trimester. My ample-sized stomach was cramping. I went out on errands and hurt so badly that I pulled over on the 10 freeway in Santa Monica. (In LA, pulling over on the freeway is no small act.) Taking a few deep breaths, I realized I should get off at the next exit onto Lincoln Boulevard. I pulled into the first parking lot that was familiar, Joann Fabrics. Driving our Ford 150, which was fairly high off the ground, I jumped down and felt liquid. I ran to the Joann’s front desk for a key to their bathroom, near hysteria.

Then I drove myself to the hospital. 

X met me there, and I was admitted to deliver our son, unready for this world.

Coincidentally, the friend who brought X to the hospital was one of the boys who lived in the suite I loved so much in college. He called X to see if there was anything else he could do.

Bring Molly, I said. 

*

Today, most of our worldly possessions are in the church, on the altar. When I packed up my New York apartment, I put Molly with my two other treasured stuffed animals in a bin with lavender and silica gels to reduce moisture. There was no room in G’s apartment for anything beyond my essentials. Molly’s bin moved from Manhattan to a storage unit in Great Barrington to the altar. 

Early in January, someone stole some of G’s tools out of the garage and tried to sell them on Facebook. Between G’s role with the fire department and the police (they share the same building and she often handles dispatch for them), it was all over as fast as it began, but it left me shaken.

I went into the church, took out Molly and brought her to the rental apartment.

*

Senior year in high school, we prepared to leave with rituals like senior pictures and yearbook quotes. This was before I had even begun to live. Everything leading up to college for me was in service to that sense of arrival. I had never been kissed. I did not know what it was to love or be in love. I was drawn to Margery Williams Bianco’s words in The Velveteen Rabbit:

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. 

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’ 

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’ 

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

…once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

Although I didn’t quote the whole passage, it is the whole passage I meant. Revealing what I may not have wanted to admit to everyone: my single wish was to be Real. To become. To be understood. To love and be loved. 

*

After G arrived safely and her first fussy months passed, my heart began to expand fully. Love and light and joy streamed through me and were received by this little being who met me there. 

In a few days G will be nineteen and her angel brother is now twenty. I see how this passage in a children’s book carried a truth that has traveled with me since I was a little girl myself. 

*

By the time I was eleven, when Molly entered my life, I knew something about fear and hurt. My parents were quietly (sometimes not so quietly) struggling. I had been to overnight camps, and I had crushes in which I was the invisible party. I tried to write and to draw (two things I wanted to be good at doing) and was told my work didn’t measure up. 

Bringing Molly out of storage a few weeks ago made me think of her role with greater distance but also with greater power. Forty years of being near me at times when no one else could reach me. When I felt so alone in the world. When I wasn’t quite ready or able to be as brave as I may have wished, or as I may have presented myself publicly. Even today I see how she is a link between the child and adult inside of me. A surrogate for my sense of belonging in my family, at school, when I was sick, when I was hurting, when I was sad, as an only child, during six months of bedrest, even as a single parent.  

I see now how her presence represents my resilience. Somehow I survived, and she was almost always there. 

*

With the prevailing winds of our country, I have been processing grief off and on for much the past year. My inciting incident may be this move to a place where I have no connections, or G’s increased need for autonomy with bursts of returns, or old loss that is simply ready and safer to process now. But as grief pulls on the root system of all former losses, I have needed to take a look at each one in my way. 

Yesterday I learned about mirror neurons and how we reflect what we live. I see that my mother’s depression is memorized in my cells. I note that I am fifty-one right now, my mother’s age when I was eleven. Her words “I am a failure as a mother,” “you both would be better off without me”—which we heartily refuted—bubble up to the surface of my consciousness. My first loss: steeling myself against the pain of her words and not being able to trust how she would see me each day. Perhaps it is no surprise that I was looking for a stuffed animal at eleven and that I would carry her with me this long.

As I take time to reflect, I feel a burgeoning sense of acceptance as all of my previous losses are now freshly shaken and aired. They are part of who I am, and part of how my heart can feel as wide open as it does some days. 

I feel an increasing sense of freedom and hopefulness about advancing into my own life. I have an awareness that while there are so many interpersonal languages I have spoken—as child, wife, and mother—I have a native language of my own, new languages I have yet to learn, and many roads I have yet to find and travel. 

The difference now is that I am no longer waiting to be Real. I am. I have become.