On my eleventh day with Helen, my five year-old, newly adopted cat, she lolled in bed with me. Sometime in the night, I awakened with her sleeping on me and I found her still splayed heavily on my chest in the morning. I slid her gently off and curled myself around her. She flopped her legs over my wrists, nestled herself into the circlet of body and tumble of blankets made by my restless sleep, and closed her eyes.
When I was around six, my family moved from Idaho to Virginia, and my child-sized teddy bear, Bearbee, was left behind in a motel room. Once he was discovered missing, I sensed my mother's distress and I, too, felt guilty and responsible for leaving him behind. Somehow I had abandoned him and been abandoned by him. He had probably fallen between the bed and the wall while I was sleeping. To attempt to protect my mother from feeling guilty, I did not cry or speak. I sat in the back seat of the red Plymouth station wagon behind my parents, beside my sister, Bearbee hundreds of miles behind us, feeling very small.
When I was about thirteen, on a shopping trip while visiting my grandparents, my mother spotted a teddy bear much like Bearbee, much too expensive, and bought it for me anyway. I slept with that Bearbee the Second for several years, matting its fur by placing my head on its chest.
I know that, psychologically speaking, Bearbee was an attachment object, an inanimate figure to which I attributed soothing traits: love, acceptance, compassion, empathy. This is normal for children. As a small girl, I loved Bearbee and was sure Bearbee loved me.
Inanimate attachment objects do not quite work for adults. After my divorce, feeling like a bereft child, I bought a large, stuffed dog and cried into its fur. But I no longer had the wishful, hopeful, magical thinking of a child. I knew the dog was shaped from flat pieces of furred cloth stitched together in China. I named him Scotty, but I knew he didn't love me.
Knees and chest around Helen that morning, not quite in the fetal position, not able to gather her delicate body to me in a child's voracious, lonely embrace, I felt some ancient stirrings of Bearbee's soothing presence. I still didn't know Helen, or feel known by her enough for me to say I loved or felt loved by her, but she was there on the bed, not missing for decades or miles, not leaving, not biting or scratching, just there. And her furry little feet were soft against my arm and, unlike Bearbee, she was breathing and she was warm.
While I was married, my sister, Margaret, would visit every year or so to stay with me and my husband, bringing one child, then two, then three. On her first visit, she brought her little boy, my nephew, who was maybe three or four years old.
Margaret and I woke up first and were lying at the foot of my bed, talking. When he awoke, the little boy, in feety pajamas, ran into the room and buried his body in his mother's. They embraced and he pushed, closer, insistent, and she held him harder, little "Mmm, mmm" sounds in her throat. Of all the Madonna and child images I have seen, that is the one that has stayed with me for its beauty, for its perfect, unguarded sincerity.
Years later, on another weekend visit, this time without children, my sister could sense that my marriage was beginning its slow, painful ending. Margaret and I stayed up past midnight talking, my husband went to work that morning, and she and I were sleeping late. I heard her call me from the guest room. I went in and she lifted the sheets for me to get in bed with her. We hadn't been in the same bed for twenty years. I lay down stiffly beside her and she gathered me in her arms as she had her son and I cried and cried, buried in the warmth of my little sister's body.
On the eleventh day with Helen, divorced, childless, far from home, with her tiny form cradled against my own body, was I holding her or being held?