 Love comes in all shapes and sizes. It might be in the gesture of a
mother, caressing the soft cheek of her newborn, or a man weeding his
grandfather’s garden.
The act of love is as varied as there are people
in this world. Human love is a powerful force, even when it is given to something that cannot talk. Love makes things alive.
Another property of love is pain. In fact, in my experience, the two go
hand in hand. Love hurts especially when you lose someone you love. You
feel a deep void which can never be quite filled again. I witnessed the
passing of a loved one a few weeks back, and I am truly, truly sad.
You see, my daughter’s favorite stuffed horse, Mormie, the one about
whom I have pitched to major women’s magazines for his nine lives, the
one who has been left in grocery stores, highway rest stops and
restaurants, the one I have written about in my upcoming book, “SAHM I
Am: Tales of a Stay-at-Home Mom in Europe” (“Mormie: Lost and
Found”) – Mormie, that Black Beauty-look alike, is gone.
He was a galant stuffed animal. His black fur gleamed in the sunlight,
and the star on his forehead had turned slightly brown from a thousand
kisses. By coincidence, our friend’s daughter had the same stuffed
animal, only hers was brown. But they weren’t the same. Not really.
When holding Mormie, you could feel something different. There was so
much love in the animal that you could almost see it. His presence
changed lives.
A little girl once found Mormie riding a kid’s size fire engine outside
a supermarket while my daughter and I rushed to kindergarten. The
girl’s daughter left her phone number with the cashier. A day later I
went back to the store in hopes they had kept Mormie in their lost and
found. I called the woman, then met her outside her house in a nearby
town. With tears in my eyes, I hugged the woman for her integrity. Her
daughter sadly gave back the animal, but she was glad to have spent
even one night with him. I profusely thanked her.
Mormie was a part of our family. He fit perfectly in the crook of my daughter’s arm and went everywhere she did.
It was only natural, then, that we would take Mormie along with us on
our week-long vacation to an exotic island off the coast of West
Africa. Mormie danced on my daughter’s head as we waited for our
luggage at baggage claim. When Nature called, all three of us skipped
to the bathroom. My daughter went in her own stall, for which I was
very proud. Beaming at her independence, I thought, “My baby’s growing
up!” Sophia and I went back to the baggage carousel and collected our
things.
One night later we discovered that Mormie was missing. We searched the
room high and low in hopes of finding that elusive animal. He had once
again disappeared. Despite asking our travel guide to return to the
airport’s lost and found, we knew Mormie was gone forever. The guide
came back empty-handed.
In that moment, when we knew Mormie was irretrievable, I made a
decision. I wrote my daughter a postcard from Mormie. He told her he
wanted to live in the sand with the camels and see the world. She had
filled him with so much love, he wrote, that it was time to share that
love with the world. He would always remember their special time
together. He signed the tear-stained postcard with love. I dropped the
card in the nearest mailbox.
At the airport waiting for our return flight, I saw a rack of stuffed
animals at a gift shop. It seemed only right to heal the experience of
loss and get my daughter a new loved one. She selected a soft gray
kitty whom she named after her vacation friends, but she let me know
Mormie would always be in her heart, even if he was no longer with us.
She seemed to have made peace with her loss, even if I was still
struggling. As our plane taxied down the runway, I shed a silent tear
for the love and loss of an era ended. My baby, and her stuffed animal,
truly were growing up.
 Christine Louise Hohlbaum
www.DiaryofaMother.com
American author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff
and SAHM I Am: Tales of a Stay-at-Home Mom in Europe (2005), has been
published in hundreds of publications.
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