When I was 5 years old, the same age my daughter is now, I sucked my thumb for comfort, and depended, too, on a child-sized quilt with a groovy orange pattern that dwells in my memory like a living cutting from the fabric of the 1970s. The quilt was lost in a move at some early point, our parting fraught with a sense of incompletion. I mourned it until I didn't, though I can still recall its texture and smell, the places in which the smooth cotton parted to reveal the rough synthetic batting underneath. As for my thumb...well, it's just a thumb now, its forbidden magic lost not in a move but to time itself -- whether gradually or suddenly, I can't be sure.

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.

---