PARENTING | My Smeetch is in the midst of a series of love affairs.

She takes up with, then abandons, stuffed animals and other soft toys at a rate that feels staggering and terrifying.

It is inexplicable.

I was the sort of child who imprinted on a particular toy and stuck with it.

Left to Right: Tigger, Poochie, Puppy, and Jubby.

Certainly, I would have periodic crushes, minor infatuations, but for the most part, I loved having one special creature, one closest friend. And I was soothed by an ordered system of affection in which each one of those friends, to my mind at least, knew their place and was comfortable in it.

I doled out my love in a distinct, descending way, working down through the assorted ragtag ranks of dogs and bears, bunnies and dolls, aware at all times of the importance of fairness and equanimity in my behaviour, while also allowing for  fidelity to the creature at the top. This makes me sound like a Medieval Lord, but I think I was just playing at understanding relationships. And I believed in being loyal.

My first love was a chocolate brown doggo with white ears and a black nose.

There was nothing special about Buster, but it is impossible to parse a child’s love for one inanimate object over another. (On some days, My Smeetch carries around a dusty russet potato, wizened and sprouting hairy eyes, cradling it with as much affection as she might any soft toy. None of this makes sense.)

A Buster-imposter literally known as “NOT Buster”.

I remember my dog’s floppy ears – holding them out and spinning his doggy body in between. Winding him up. Then pulling. Uncoiling him the other way.

I remember a dirty length of string that I liked to tie around his neck. I’d drag him around, say I was walking him.

That’s how Buster was lost.

I was dragging him around an airport in India, against parental instructions, and at some point, he was left behind. I realized he wasn’t with me before we got on the plane. Walking across the hot tarmac, I told my father, and then couldn’t accept it when Buster was not retrieved. I held a grudge about this for years, until I was old enough to understand that the airfield was ringed with armed guards. To break from the chain of foreign travellers at a run, my father thought, was asking to be shot.

Buster was consciously abandoned. Knowingly lost. In my memory, I cried all the way home.

I couldn’t have, of course. Travel time back to Toronto was more than 24 hours, broken into multiple flights.

I was two years old.

For the first two years of her life, Smeetchy cared nothing for soft toys.

My Smeetch is entirely herself.

Like all children, she has been, from the very beginning, entirely herself, entirely her own person, doing things in her own way. So a coterie of pristine, velveteen “friends” sat in her room, unloved and untouched, almost imperious in their perfection.

I would occasionally present her with one, dangle it in front of her baby eyes, even animate it, give it a voice (a skill I’ve generally found to be a real crowd pleaser with children and adults alike), but the most she would offer was a quick hug or a performative kiss before tossing the toy aside.

She just didn’t care.

I postulated to Nathan that her disinterest might be linked back to our attachment-style parenting. Though her room is decked out with twin beds, beautifully decorated, and filled with everything a small child could want, she doesn’t use it. At least, not for sleeping. She continues to spend every night nestled between us, has no use for blankets or pillows, no use for comfort objects of any kind. She is so secure, so loved, never left to fend for herself in the dark. The cold comfort of polyester filling and flame-retardant fur must be a mystery to her, I said.

Animated gif from Tocaya (Ale Favoretti).

I suppose I was giving myself a little pat on the back for choosing to raise her this way. I myself was terrified at night as a child, and often lonely, but despite being plagued by nightmares and somniloquy, just as I was, she experiences none of that fear. We are always right there.

Smeetch alternates between spreading out like a muscled starfish and curling up against me like a small worm, wriggling in her sleep, as if to burrow back inside my body. If she needs something at night, she turns to us.

So things went, until she got her hands on a particular bear.

Football-esque, with stubby paws and microfibre fur, the bear was a Craigslist freebie, tossed it in along with a dining table I bought from a family who’d grown out of it. We christened him “Henry” for some reason I’ve already forgotten, which quickly became “My Henry” then just as quickly, plain “Henry” again.

The name wasn’t the child’s choice. She takes after father in this arena, and is always going for the obvious. Had it been up to her, he would simply be “Bear”. She’s already expressed that she thinks naming toys is somewhat ridiculous, and a little beneath her.

“They’re just toys, Mama,” she tells me.

She liked Henry, and I overreacted immediately, assuming she’d found her forever friend, but this was not to be. Soon, Henry had not only been abandoned, but was almost reviled. Were I to dare suggest playing with him, she might become irate, tossing him violently back into her toy bin and slamming the lid with a bang.

Lately she’s been slightly more tender with poor Henry. Gently tucking his full body into a knit winter hat, she recently informed me that he’d entered “his sleeping bag” and was not to be touched. He’s set aside that way now, away from the other toys, enveloped in her Toronto Blue Jays toque.

My Henry has taken happily to his “sleeping bag” prison.

She might give him an occasional pat as she goes past, but it is a pitying gesture, as though she feels a vague, nostalgic fondness that she can no longer explain. It reminds me of how one might feel about a high school boyfriend. Slightly embarrassed, but not willing to throw him away entirely.

Except for Buster, I still have all of my old top-tier stuffies.

They were loved, in descending order as I mentioned, as follows: Tigger, Poochie, Puppy, Jubby. They can be seen in their current state in the image near the top.

Tigger is the oldest, a gift for my second birthday from my maternal grandmother. She took me to Toys ‘R’ Us and said I could pick anything I wanted, trusting in the inherent ignorance and inexplicability of all toddlers to choose something mundane and inexpensive. But on the way there we passed a window display at a watchmaker, or perhaps a jewellery store (this part is unclear). Included for some reason in the window was a strange blue dog, the colour of a swimming pool in Florida.

Seeing him, I immediately declared (I remember declaring), “I want that dog.”

At the toy store, my grandmother valiantly tried to sell me on other things – an orange plastic grocery cart, a yellow hula hoop, even an electric car. She wouldn’t have bought it (the car, I mean). She just wanted to distract me from the little blue dog.

2018 Tigger, aged 36 (min), lives in my underwear drawer.

I would not be moved.

In the end, she returned to the maybe-jewellery-maybe-watch-maybe-something-else store and somehow convinced them to dismantle their display and sell her the toy.

She was good about things like this. Imperfect, in many ways, but surprisingly understanding, and fierce.

We took the little dog back to her condo and I looked him in the face, standing eye to eye with him on the surface of her dining room table and me on the floor. I named him Tigger, after Tigger the Tiger from Winnie The Pooh, and played that he was bouncing along on his tail. Bouncy bouncy bounce.

When Buster was lost, Tigger slid into the top spot in my heart. In later years, I would construct a whole personality and history for him that included him being a one-dog military general (his favourite phrase being “I’m the army”) and having a taste for pork crackling (though his favourite food, I decided, was nutshells).

Months after Smeetch’s break with Henry, I came across a small Curious George toy at a thrift store and absentmindedly brought it home.

George, looking extremely ill indeed.

Despite my efforts to break her of the habit, Smeetch enjoys all things Curious George and it was fifty cents. I figured if the toy pleased her for an hour, it would be a worthwhile purchase.

After a quick trip through the wash, she seemed delighted by this new arrival. Wanted to hold it in the car, carried George around the house.

Nathan devised a “hospital” game, where George would fall ill and need treatment, and Smeetchy would administer it, taking special care to check the monkey’s breathing and listen to his heart with a small plastic stethoscope.

She took to asking for George at bedtime, though she seemed more interested in the ritual than the relationship. He’d fall from her grasp as she fell asleep and she’d forget about him, sometimes for days at a time. I’d pop him on the nightstand, unworried.

It was an easy love to manage.

Jubby, the least-loved.

I understand a lukewarm love. These sorts of relationships can be peaceful, a relief from the more tumultuous sort.

The last to arrive in my pack of personal favourites was a white dog with dangling, overlong limbs.

I can’t recall where he came from, he simply appeared.

I was about seven and I disliked him immediately. Thinking to insult him, I held him up to declare him “chubby” but misspoke, and said “jubby”. Wanting to cover my mistake, I embraced it as his name, a punishment, since I secretly blamed him for embarrassing me.

Tigger, Poochie, and Puppy, my top three, “slept” in my bed with me, but I consigned Jubby to a shoebox on the floor. I decked it out with pillows and blankets and was careful to kiss him goodnight. (Remember, I was a benevolent Lord.) Nonetheless, each night, inevitably wracked with guilt, I’d be compelled to rescue Jubby from exile and bring him into bed with me instead, the thought that he might sense that he was less loved than the others proving too intense to tolerate. I was plagued with worry about my mistreatment of this toy, yet seethed with resentment at the way he managed to worm his way in, nonetheless.

I’m aware of how this sounds, but I was an imaginative child. I don’t know if I truly believed that my toys had feelings, but I also wasn’t certain. And most importantly, I wanted to believe. I figured I was better safe than sorry.

I have a cousin who’s five or six years younger than me who became briefly obsessed with Jubby when we were children.

Dirty Wow Wow and Other Love Stories: A Tribute to the Threadbare Companions of Childhood, 2007.

Just two years old, she decided his relatively unmarred white facade suited her, and played with and asked for him incessantly over the course of one summer.

I was old enough to think her a very little girl, and to sense that since she was small and I was big, the right thing to do would be to gift him to her, but not so old that I was actually willing to do it.

Jubby was not my favourite, but he was still mine.

Thanks initially to this threat, Jubby began to grow on me. In my mind, our relationship is akin to an arranged marriage.

There are those you love immediately, and others that you must learn to love.

(The cousin was gifted her own white doggy who she quickly named “Chubby” and loved with such abandon he was soon reduced to little more than a sort of threadbare plastic mesh with eyes. Thirty years ago he was already in much worse shape than Tigger is now. To see other stuffies loved into a similar – though not quite as threadbare – state, check out the book Dirty Wow Wow and Other Love Stories: A Tribute to the Threadbare Companions of Childhood, 2007.)

Smeetch and Foxy, a brief affair.

After several weeks of lukewarm romance with George, Smeetchy became suddenly infatuated with a limbless fox.

A Christmas 2017 purchase from Target, the fox was ignored for nearly six months before she inexplicably began requesting his presence in our bed every night. She clung to him, even in sleep, and if “Foxy” were to fall from her grasp, she’d paw madly around in a foggy panic. “Where’s Foxy!?” she’d cry at 2:00 am. “Where IS he?”, refusing to relax until he was returned to her arms.

She’d never slept with Henry. Surely, I thought, Foxy was the one.

But as abruptly as it began, the affair ended. Foxy’s fallen out of favour, and been relegated to the sidelines. “You hold Foxy” she’ll say to me, as we lie in bed together. “I will hold my bunny.”

Bunny, by the way, is an exceptionally soft, realistically-toned, Jellycat hare. “A girl bunny” according to Smeetch (though gender is fluid in her mind, which I encourage).

Infatuation with Bunny lasted a mere week. Still, it was a love so intense, it has resulted in the loss of the toy’s preternatural softness. Bunny’s fur has already gone a bit matted and hanked.

Smeetch trolls me after her theft of Puppy.

There have been several others.

For days, Smeetch crushed on an red plush heart that I got at the CNE as a toddler. (I used it as a powder puff. It still holds the vague scent of Johnson’s Baby Powder talc in its core.)

She briefly loved on a wizened skunk of Nathan’s, on a foam-hardened, easter-blue seal of mine from early 1980s, and on a red rubber crab (actually a puzzle piece).

Then for two weeks, she was obsessed with Puppy, one of my own childhood top-four. (You can see her hand making to grab him from his place near the top of this piece.)

Puppy has since been kicked into the dust bunnies under the bed. When I suggested we pull him out and brush him off, my child shrugged and left the room. His fate couldn’t be further from her concern.

This, after two weeks of crying every night if she woke to find him an inch from her hands.

Is she some kind of sociopath?

I’m (mostly) joking, but I admit that I can’t understand her heart.

With my plush heart from the CNE, circa 1983.

Having desperately loved my own special toys, I suppose I liked the idea of her repeating the process. I keep expecting one of her loves to stick, but right now, it seems her affections will remain in flux.

The urge to see a child through the lens of our own experience is strong.

To want them to relive our memories, only in a guided way that allows them to skip all the bad bits and learn from all the mistakes without actually having to experience them, is understandable. But we must resist.

I see in the depths of my heart all the tiny ways that I unconsciously pressure my child to be who I want her to be, which is often who I was, and all of the countless ways she resists, and I know that she’s right. She can only be herself. And it is wrong to expect her to be or do anything else.

I am slightly disturbed at the speed at which she seems to withdraw affection, at the sudden shift that turns her cold. People with that tendency have hurt me before. (I try not to put that baggage on her shoulders, either.) At the same time, I admire her capacity to love fiercely, to form intense connections, to give so much of her little heart. And I almost envy her ability to rip away her affections and feel no compunction to explain. Like my grandmother, she is fierce.

As of last Friday, the top spot in Smeetchy’s heart is held by “Dolly Dolly”, a small stuffed child toy from the dollar store. I don’t know how long it will last. I wonder if it means anything. She would say it doesn’t. She is already inured to my worry.

“They’re just toys, Mama,” she says so often, patting my knee. “It’s okay.” 

My Smeetch worked with me on what she called the “big friends photographsing project” for this post. Getting together the images for “To all the toys I’ve loved before” was one wild and crazy hour. 

With Dolly Dolly, her latest love.