Stuffed animals and how we grow

She comes into our bedroom at 10:30 p.m., around the time of night that the last of us in the house tend to be winding down for the night, tucking in, turning off lights, though our lights are still on. Our mouths smell of toothpaste. Kate and I are talking softly about something inconsequential in our day when we hear her footsteps coming down from the attic aerie where she sleeps. She comes in, somewhat slowly. 14 years old; 9th grade, and as she has been since toddler hood, independent, ambitious, and well-connected enough to rarely look back.

She plops down on our bed, her body language for once slow and mournful, and we rub her shoulders. When she doesn’t immediately volunteer anything, we ask: “Honey, what’s going on?”

“I have all these stuffed animals,” she says, her voice cracking, “and I’ve just realized that I no longer care about them.”

There’s a pause.

Realizing that we might not be tracking with her, she raises her eyes, bright with tears. “I used to care about them all, and now… they’re just stuffed animals.”

We make some sympathetic sound, but she’s not done yet. “I look at them and I can remember what it’s like to care about them, and I can remember that things seemed a lot simpler when I did,” and here she starts to sniffle a little, “and I didn’t worry about so many things. Now I’ve got all these … things to worry about. I want to go back to when things were simpler, but of course I can’t. And I don’t care about the stuffed animals any more.”

I cast my own mind back to the memories when I had a stuffed animal friend (“Lambie,” a blackfaced sheep whose velvety snout I loved smooth over the years). I have a vague, sepia-toned memory of sleeping while clutching him, and I talked with our 14 year old about her memories of the kid she was being something that she can choose to maintain, to think about and re-live every once in a while, if she wants to recall who she was back a ways … but yes, that the mourning for that child’s passage and the uncertainty about who the person is she’s becoming next can leave someone lost between memory and anticipation.

Our experience of ourselves today, right now, feels in the moments of our short term memory, like we’ll never lose it. How can we, with the scents and sights and sounds of the present moment so very vivid to us … but the thing we all know and rarely discuss is how little of these moments we truly retain. A flash here and a taste there, but mostly, I find, it’s the narratives we tell ourselves later. “I had a great dinner, and it wowed me,” we can easily access, and only in rare cases can we access the actual taste of the cheese, the actual whoosh of the roller coaster. Embarrassing moments from classroom gaffes we retain effortlessly even when we don’t want to, but the taste of the best meals we’ve had escapes us.

So we pat her on her back and congratulate her for growing and commiserate with the distance she’s feeling from the kid she used to be. We gently remind her that day-to-day, the younger kids she and her sister have been have not, in fact, been endlessly happy (another case where our wildly wasteful memories throw out all the moments of tedium and so much else).

And as I fall asleep, I wonder when we stopped mourning our past selves so clearly and honestly. Because the number of them kept growing over the years? Because we learned to look forward to the next self more than we grieved the last ones? Or because we gradually lose the inclination or capacity. I realize I have no idea where Lambie is now, and wonder.