My Bear

What a successful long-term relationship looks like

As of today, this remains my longest relationship. Updated November 23, 2020.

Yes, I sleep with a Teddy Bear.

The Bear doesn’t have a name or gender but calling the Bear “it” seems disrespectful. The Bear only has one eye and that was my doing. That Bear should be accorded every courtesy.

I never slept with stuffed animals as a kid although for some months when I was six I did sleep with my cowboy boots right next to the bed so I could reach out and marvel at them anew every time I woke during the night (I had it bad for Roy Rogers).

The longest relationship in my life before the Bear was with the kitten I stole from a drunken house party in 1978.

Puss lived 22 years and moved to New York City with me in 2000. She kept both eyes her entire life. I had the Bear for that shit.

The Bear and I have been together since 1994 when I started group therapy for survivors of family sexual abuse. The facilitator suggested we get stuffed animals to sleep with and to beat the fuck out of because we were going to need to direct a lifetime of rage at something that could take it. She knew what she was talking about. Remember, the Bear does only have one eye.

Yes, I used to pound the living hell out of the Bear. That facilitator was not kidding about rage. Here I thought I was a fairly well-adjusted woman and, after all, the abuse in our family wasn’t all that bad. It’s not as if anyone was being raped or anything. In fact, at the time that it was happening I thought it felt kind of good and I was pretty sure I was initiating it. I was 14. For decades I’d been denying suffocating helplessness, fear, anxiety, and a sense I’d never be clean and right again.

And here was the Bear to absorb all that rage

I was in two complete 12-week rounds of group therapy and then I began four years of one on one therapy. The Bear took the worst of it during those months of group therapy. That’s when I was finally able to realize the truth about what had been happening in my family since long before I was born. I was educated in how I’d been groomed to allow these things to be done to me. I finally understood that, at 14, I had initiated nothing. Nor did I ever have any choice in what was happening.

And, let me tell you, I was pissed off.

To anyone around me at the time who didn’t understand how disruptive and terrifying group work can be, it must have looked like I’d gone off the deep end. And, well yes, I had.

Curled up in a ball in the shower, sobbing uncontrollably.

Rocking in a corner, rhythmically bumping my head into the wall.

Beating the ever-loving you-know-what out of a poor, defenseless Bear.

No healing without pain

At the time it all felt too much. It seemed like a pointless exercise in tearing open old wounds that I thought were healed. I mistook emotional scar tissue for healing. And those old scarred over places had to be reopened.

There were enormous maze-like structures of blame and denial that I’d carefully constructed over decades that had to come down.

And I was ready.

I didn’t feel ready. I felt horribly vulnerable and at risk. But I was supported every step of the way by my therapist and by the women in my life at that time. Women like Lee.

Lee would hold me for hours, rocking me and assuring me I was ok.

Lee took my hands in hers during one of those bleak, awful days and promised me that I was going to know joy like I never even knew existed. Even then I believed her. The joy she was talking about has been the direct result of me reaching out to another woman and walking with her through that awful darkness and back into the light.

I’ve made Lee’s promise to many other women.

It’s a form of spiritual and emotional alchemy. We take the shit of our past and spin it into something golden. Lee did it with me and countless other women and I’ve had the incredible privilege of passing that forward to more women than I can remember.

Moving to New York City

What to keep and what to toss? I had several large closets in my beautiful apartment in The Kensington on Lake Avenue and they were overflowing with junk.

I got pretty ruthless in those last days before the move and began just throwing things away almost without looking at what they were.

But my journals? And the Bear?

Yes, it had been years since my time in therapy. I hadn’t beaten the Bear in longer than I could remember. But I slept with the Bear every night. I don’t think I ever considered not bringing that Bear with me. The journals? Those I hesitated over but in the end, here they are, in the little cupboard above the refrigerator. Why? I don’t know, but that’s a life written down in all those notebooks and I can’t just toss them away. At least not yet.

The Bear smells a little funny

We’re talking a stuffed animal that I’ve slept with nearly every night for over 26 years (no, I don’t take the Bear to Burning Man. Please).

I’ve thrown the Bear into the wash from time to time. It’s not that the Bear stinks or anything, thank goodness, but that poor Bear has absorbed a lot. The Bear was probably made in some factory in China and shipped over here with ten thousand identical Bears to sit on a shelf in K-mart (I think) until I came along. I imagine one or two of my Bear’s compatriots are sitting on tidily made beds, forgotten by the kids that once cuddled them. Most are long consigned to landfills.

Not my Bear.

I can’t imagine replacing my Bear. Should the day come, and it is coming, that the poor thing finally starts falling to pieces I guess I won’t have any choice. I’ll have to throw my Bear away. I suppose I could sneak off to Central Park some drizzly night when there isn’t anyone around and give the Bear a proper burial. Unlikely.

But I won’t be buying a new Bear.

My Bear was there for me throughout the insane upheaval of deeply buried truths being dug up and faced. My Bear has been snuggled in my arms for something like 114,000 nights (sheesh!). Who knew a cheap Teddy Bear from K-mart would be so durable and so very cherished?

I’m relieved that the Bear is still holding up. I won’t have to be making that tough decision any time soon.

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