Now that I'm a mother, I'm more familiar with the language in parenting books that describes the "transitional objects" our children choose to drag about as our material stand-ins. Special teddy bears, burp cloths, silkies, Binkies, and bops: These increasingly tattered, smelly, and disgusting items are said to represent nothing less than body and breast to our children, and to transmit the same emotional comforts. My daughter Amelia has a pillow, though even to write those words feels reductive. Start over. His name (yes, it's a boy) is Green Pillow. He has a satin edge so frayed that it's nearly gone, has lived in Amelia's crib or bed since her infancy, and boasts a bio so intricately imagined that I'd bet you good money I could ace a Myers-Briggs test on his behalf. He has his own creation myth (my daughter described giving birth to him herself, which she accomplished by pulling him from under her shirt with a flourish; his father, sadly, died before she'd carried the pregnancy to term). Most important, whatever Amelia encounters, especially if it's hard, is eased by the fact that Green Pillow has an even better, crazier story. Time-out? Green Pillow once had a time-out for 20 days, she tells us, surviving on spoiled bananas and dirty water. New school? Green Pillow was so scared on his first day of school that he ran away to Venezuela. Doctor's visit? Green Pillow had to be reassured, too, during the times he got vaccinated last year, broke his nonexistent arm, and went to the ER to be hydrated with an IV because the poor thing couldn't stop throwing up spicy chili.
Recently, Green Pillow was lost for three days during a family vacation, and the grief I glimpsed when I thought that he might be really and irretrievably lost startled me with its depth. I felt embarrassed when I began to suspect that my anxiety about Green Pillow's whereabouts was surpassing my daughter's. She was anxious, of course, that he be found, and bedtime was difficult during the days we searched for him, but I was the one still awake once Amelia had been soothed to sleep with my promises that tomorrow we'd keep looking.
I lay there in our rented house, revisiting the mental checklist of places Green Pillow could have been left, worrying that my daughter might be facing a void where her partner in imagination and font of security had been -- and also worrying, oddly, mortifyingly, for myself. Here was the truth: As Green Pillow had functioned for so long as a locus of stories, affectionate squeezes, and nightly pre-bedtime searches of the house, so had he become, for me, a locus around which many of my strongest emotions as a mother had coalesced.
He and I had been partners; this arbitrary piece of fuzzy green fabric was an additional offering I could make as a parent whenever the wounds of childhood opened: the betrayal of the nurse's needle, the shock of a hard fall, the loneliness after the last kiss good night.
And this: The fact that the guy had vanished in the first place meant that Amelia had relinquished him from her grasp and forgotten him somewhere, which was uncharacteristic for her and seemed to foreshadow one of those leaps in growth that, as a parent, you assume are going to unfurl in slow motion, preceded by ample warning. Green Pillow had apparently, instantly, become something that could be left behind, whereas up until two minutes ago he'd seemed an appendage of Amelia's body, little different from the '70s incarnation of my thumb. How many times had I seen her rise from her bed in the night to climb into ours, or to ask to be accompanied to the bathroom, barely conscious at all but conscious enough to have scooped up Green Pillow on the way? How many times had she stood swaying in her nightgown, her eyes already closing, hugging Green Pillow to her chest like a talisman while I led her gently by the hand toward her bedroom and tucked her back in?
Clearly, I had lost perspective -- if not my mind. But being a parent is not always a rational enterprise. There is nothing new about the human impulse to assign meaning to inanimate things. Engagement rings are promises and stories instead of metal and stones; religious icons transport; pieces of clothing are deemed lucky; Grandfather's old chair is declared to have a soul. The material is always an eager understudy for the emotional, willing to step onstage and fill a role that a person or spiritual idea has recently occupied; we people, by ourselves, can never fulfill one another's most naked needs all the time.
Children are innately practical -- perhaps their common adoption of stuff they can hold on to in place of our hands and bodies is just the first step in a lifelong dance with the power of objects. That we, as parents, are complicit in this is evidence that we understand our own shortcomings. Unless we are kangaroos, or members of those oft-cited tribes who don't remove their offspring from their chests until they can walk off on their own, we're probably going to have to call upon the understudies at some point. Enter pacifier, pillow, stuffed hippo, stage left. The twist I hadn't expected, which revealed itself in Green Pillow's absence, was that I had assigned the same level of symbolic value to a childhood security object as my daughter had. He had become a repository of comfort and memory for me, too. He embodied my daughter's innocence somehow -- and, admittedly, her need of me. He marked our passage together into the world, as mother and child. Green Pillow had been there at all the important junctures, had had pee, snot, tears, and blood laundered out of him, time after time. The physical loss of him represented the potential loss of nothing less than an era, and of my role as a caregiver. No wonder I couldn't sleep.
Having been lost on a Friday, Green Pillow turned up on a Monday, at a restaurant in the seaside town we were visiting (the place had been closed all weekend). After a jubilant phone call confirming his whereabouts, I tore down to the docks in my car, ran in, and claimed him.
I planned to rush him home and surprise Amelia, but first I ran into two women with older kids outside, whom I knew only a little from former vacations in the town. I realize, in retrospect, what a picture of insanity I must have made, saying hello and exchanging the usual superficial pleasantries, all the while pressing a dingy pillow against my cheek. I can't remember whether I explained what I was doing holding and stroking this raggedy pile of fabric while trying to carry on my end of the conversation, or the leap of joy I made from the top step down to the sidewalk once we'd said our goodbyes. In my excitement, I suspect I didn't.
Amelia was ecstatic when she saw him. She flung herself at Green Pillow, clutching him tighter than I had, and closed her eyes, breathing him in. Then she trotted across the yard with him in hand, just like always. I'm not naive enough to think of this as the end of the story, though. If those brief and eternal hours between lost and found taught me anything, it's that my days of stepping back and letting the tiny relinquish ments that are such a natural part of my child's -- and my -- growth happen are only beginning. As the lyric that blared from the radio during the groovy era in which I sucked my thumb and clutched my own quilt goes: The first cut is the deepest. Losses, great and small, will accrue in my relationship with Amelia and in her life as it gathers time and heft and assumes a trajectory of its own: losses of innocence and the various childhood totems that, during their glorious, abbreviated runs, seemed to matter most.
Next time one of these losses occurs, I'll try not to freak out, and will most likely fail. For now, I'll enjoy the reprieve that the reappearance of Green Pillow has given us, and try to remember that there are certain things we can't hold on to forever, that we will eventually lose. This fall, Amelia enters kindergarten, and you might see me at some point outside her school, a fuzzy greenish-grayish square of cotton and satin dangling from my hand. Green Pillow, I love you, buddy. We'll get through it together, as best we can.
Heather Clay's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, and her first novel will be published later this year by Knopf. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.
