lucy
for my son's birthday: on loving and letting go and the passage of time
Today is my son Daniel’s 30th birthday. Daniel - or DJ, as he is mostly known - is a very private person, which is why I don’t write a lot about him on here. He’s not on twitter, he barely goes on Facebook; he likes to keep his life offline. So instead of a lengthy post about him and his life and his trials and tribulations, and how much I love him, I’m going to tell you about an artifact from his life.
Lucy at one time was soft and pink and perfect. She’s now a dingy gray, dirtied and ragged from being dragged around playgrounds, baseball fields and backyards. She has been to hell and back. She’s been stitched and sewed and washed and dried. She’s been carried to Disney World and to nursery school. She’s been dragged through mud and dropped in spaghetti and tossed around by mean teenage cousins. She’s been attacked by dogs and cats, and had emergency heart surgery when a Jack Russell terrier put a hole in her chest. She’s 30 years old and she sits in a place of honor on a shelf in my bedroom.
Lucy belonged to my son Daniel. She was given to him at his Christening and sat on a shelf in his room for about six months, when my daughter took her down and gave her to Daniel in an effort to quiet down an earache-induced crying jag. He grabbed onto her, and didn’t let go for four years. He held onto her as if his life force existed inside her and he would disappear if he let Lucy go. The one time we lost her at the mall, I was more panicked than the time my daughter got lost at the Bronx Zoo (I knew she was running back to the llamas). Thankfully, we found her and carried on with our lives.
Lucy was part of the family, present in all our pictures from those four years, sitting at the dinner table with us, accompanying us on vacations. Where Daniel was, Lucy was there. She was his best friend for a while, keeping him company in the dark, giving him comfort when he was away from home, snuggling with him at night, watching Sesame Street with him during the day.
One day when he was four, Daniel came to me and said “Lucy doesn’t want to play with me anymore.” He wasn’t sad, he was smiling. He was almost five and just ready to move on with his life. We gave Lucy a bath and, for the last time, he pulled up a chair and sat in front of the dryer while Lucy tumbled around. When she was all fluffy and dry, we put her on a shelf in his room.
Quite a few years ago, I was on an airplane to California when I decided to watch Toy Story 3. There’s a scene toward the end where Andy, off to college, stops by Bonnie’s house and gives his treasured toys to her. I cried on that plane. I bawled. I was in the middle seat. My ex-husband, asleep on the window seat had no idea, but the person next to me in the aisle seat kept asking if I was okay. No, I was not okay. My kids — who grew up with Andy and Woody and Buzz, who were basically his age — were effectively no longer children. Andy giving those beloved toys to Bonnie struck me in my heart. Here was Andy handing off his childhood, ready and willing to leave it behind. I saw my kids there, and in that instant I felt their hands falling from mine, a signal they wouldn’t need me anymore, they were adults now, they were grown human beings who would navigate the world alone, without the toys they had gathered, without the trappings of childhood, without me. I sat there crying and I thought of Lucy, who was no longer on a shelf in Daniel’s room, but in my room now, a piece of his younger years left for me to safeguard. When he handed Lucy to me all those years ago, Daniel was shedding toddlerhood as he got ready to go to kindergarten. When he gave her to me for safekeeping all those years later, he handed me his childhood. I am easily devastated by emotions, and this epiphany on an airplane while watching a kid’s movie was no exception.
I look at Lucy every day. She’s a gentle reminder of some very sweet moments during some very rough years. And she’s also a reminder that somewhere inside my adult son, there still lies that sweet little boy who loved his Lucy. Every once in a while he checks to make sure I still have her. Of course I do. She’s family.
