Real Is a Thing That Happens to You
This post was written on March 17, 2017.
“Do you still love Roary?”
This is the question Lucia asks me at bedtime almost every night. Roary is a plush lion that was mine when I was a kid--I got it for Christmas when I was seven, and it was always one of my favorites. For years it lived in my old bedroom in Connellsville, along with a few other treasured animals. Then, last summer, just before she turned seven, Lucia appropriated it during a visit.
Molly had a Roary too, so Greta took hers, and though Greta loves any and all stuffed animals, Roary didn’t make too dramatic an impression. Lucia, however, fell in love with it immediately and intensely and has been inseparable from Roary ever since.
But Lucia’s relationship with Roary is also filled with pathos. Roary often cries because he “misses his mommy,” and can only be consoled by reassurances that I, his former mom, am right nearby. Lucia insists that I hug and kiss Roary each night in an elaborate ritual, and that’s when she asks her question--”Do you still love Roary?”--to which I reply of course I love Roary, I’ll always love Roary, I’m so happy he’s here with us, he’s so happy to be with you. The answers I give seem to satisfy her, but she’s clearly uneasy, too, at the idea that I could have ever forgotten about this beloved thing. That there was ever a time when I’d moved on, left him behind. Lucia’s devotion to Roary seems, in part, as kind of reparation for my own betrayal.
(This is not the kind of everyday conversation a person with hoarding tendencies should have. What other treasures have I lost along the way?)
Though she’s only seven, Lucia seems to understand that there will be a point when she, too, will leave Roary behind. At breakfast not long ago, Roary in her lap, she said with a kind of uneasy excitement that she’ll give Roary to her own little girl one day--in other words, that he’ll always be with us, passed along forever, never truly forgotten but just re-homed again and again. Lucia’s given him a second life; perhaps this isn’t his last.
Isn’t this kind of a troubling image for a seven-year-old to harbor? To imagine the progression of life, the leaving behind of childhood, even as she’s squarely in it? She shouldn’t have a sense of its ending. She shouldn’t know enough yet to understand that what comes next won’t be as magical, as easy.
The armchair psychologist in me easily finds hours and hours of rich material to analyze in all of this. But she’s my very own child, and I suppose this fraught territory shouldn’t come as any surprise: one of my standard childhood questions was, “Will it last forever?” Still, it’s eerie to remember having exactly the same kind of thoughts when I was her age--in my case, I imagined my security blanket forgotten as I walked away with a blurry-faced husband. (Therapists, we’re going to need more than fifty minutes for this one.)
Roary has held up very well for thirty-three years. For now, he lives on.
PS: Not surprisingly, thinking about Roary and best-loved toys made me think of the cruelest of all children’s books, The Velveteen Rabbit, which is where the title of this post comes from. Of course I don’t condone banning books, any books. But I might make an exception for this one. There is such a thing as a book that’s just too sad.
