Learning from Scruffy

If you’ve ever second guessed your choices as a parent, maybe you'll understand how hard it can be to relinquish control, to let your child chart their own path.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been driving around with a three-foot tall stuffed bear in the backseat of my car. Scruffy has lived on my daughter’s bed since she was in sixth grade. Then, she wore braces and attended classes with a mask over her face. Then, she barely reached my shoulders and I had to remind her to brush her hair. Things have changed.

I became used to seeing Scruffy slumped beside her when I’d pad into her room to wish her goodnight. When bedridden with a cold, his ample belly held my daughter’s movie-playing device. Scruffy has become as much a part of her room as the bed itself, so a few weeks ago, when I saw Scruffy on the floor at the foot of the stairs, I thought my daughter planned to wash him. I added Scruffy to a load and then tossed him in the dryer with a few errant tennis balls. But when I hoisted him in my arms and carried this fresher version of Scruffy back to my daughter’s room, she looked up at me from her desk. “Oh, no. I don’t want him anymore.”

“You don’t want Scruffy?” I tightened my grasp.

“No,” she said.

No, thought to myself.

At sixteen, my daughters’ lives are in constant transition. They are learning how to drive and one is practicing CPR to become a lifeguard. In opening to such new experiences, they must close themselves off from others--people and experiences and things that are part of youth.

For years, bounce-house birthday parties and Easter baskets included toys, miniature and colorful versions of the real thing: stuffed animals and play kitchens and dolls with movable limbs and the shapes of full-grown women. Inside blanket forts and basements, such objects ignited my daughters’ imaginations.

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

I am grateful to live in a time and country where children have the opportunity to play. And yet I wonder, why does my daughter’s rejection of Scruffy feel personal? Where is the line between a healthy boundary with one’s child and one that is less nourishing?

In “The Borders,” Sharon Olds upon the birth of her daughter, considers how Olds herself was mothered when she says:

I will take care of you, I will

Put you first. I will not, ever

Have a daughter as I was had,

I will not ever swim in you

The way my mother swam in me and I

Felt myself swum in.

I return to those lines again and again: I will not ever swim in you/The way my mother swam in me and I /Felt myself swum in.

Have my daughters felt themselves swum in?

---

Four weeks of driving around with Scruffy in my car beside my grocery bags and yoga mat, curled up receipts from the drugstore and I’m still thinking about it. If you’ve ever second guessed your choices as a parent, maybe you’ll understand how hard it can be to relinquish control, to let your child take the wheel and move in the direction that feels good and right to her.

Toys fill in the space that adults cannot reach. They serve as a bridge between childhood and adolescence only like all supports, at some point they are outgrown.

Scruffy once nestled in my daughter’s arms, maybe she hugged him when she was anxious or upset. There are likely many times in the past four years when he was there for her and I was not--and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Her world away from me expands as my world takes on a new dimension as well.

When I held the clean Scruffy in my arms, my daughter could have just taken him, finding a space for him on her bed or inside her closet. But such subterfuge would only prolong what has already arrived. What do we owe our children? Maybe to give them the space to speak their minds. Maybe to let them be.

So, in this in-between place, I give thanks to the small things. To beloved stuffed animals and speaking our truths as we turn closer to who and what each of us are meant to be.