Molly Bears

10.28.13

      "Alex, you'll never guess what I found out tonight," I started with a rush. I was so excited when I got home from the group counseling I was multi-tasking and looking up the details of the Molly Bear organization while I talked to him.
       His reaction was less than I expected. I wanted him to be excited. I wanted him to be in awe that there was an organization that would make such an amazing gift. We could kind of hold her again, we wouldn't have to settle for her Jenny Bunny that was super soft but had very little weight to it. Oh! Or maybe they could take the Jenny Bunny and make it  the Molly Bear! That would be even better! I needed one, and it was just a matter of registering and then talking Alex in to paying for the sponsor ship or getting somebody else to sponsor us... Surely my parents would do that for me. I wanted one so badly.
       The story of the Molly Bears is kind of interesting: the mom who started the organization was the mom of a stillbirth, and she was in the grocery store one day measuring out rice when she realized that she could make the rice weigh the exact same as her baby did. She said she cried when she had it all in one bag, and was pretty sure the people around the grocery store thought she was crazy. Then she went home and created little bean bags and stuffed them inside a teddy bear to make the very first Molly bear, named after her daughter, Molly. Finally! Somebody who had been where I was and had a solution to it!
        Alex paused as I told him all this and finally said, "Well... If you think that would help you." What? What did he mean if it would help me? Didn't he think that it was so awesome and he couldn't wait to hold our Molly (or Kaitlyn) bear?? Didn't he see how wonderful it would be to sit in the rocker and hold something that was weighted the exact same as Kaitlyn was?? I was less than thrilled with his reaction. And then, it kind of hit me what he meant.
       Having a bear weighted the same as Kaitlyn was never going to be Kaitlyn. It wasn't going to bring her back, it wouldn't replace her, and it probably would have been a step in the wrong direction. I want so badly to hold my daughter and to rock her in the glider that we had bought for her.  I wanted to be able to sing to her and read to her and feel her breathing in my arms. But this bear wasn't going to be able to do that. It wasn't going to be able to fill the void in my heart from having my daughter be gone. It was going to be a stagnant reminder of who our daughter was. It would never grow, never change weights, but stay the same. A constant reminder of who we were missing. But I still wanted it.
       The interesting thing about Molly Bears is that only the parents can order one. You can't have a friend or a grandparent order one, it has to be the parent. Without Alex's support on this, I felt like I was forcing it on him. I know that if I had decided to get one, he never would have held it. But I know that Alex knows me better than anyone else on the planet, and he was expressing (in a very loving way) that having a Molly Bear was probably a bad idea for me. He didn't think that it would help me in my recovery, but rather push me back into all the feelings that I had been wrestling with so hard over the past few weeks. Would it have been something to hold on to? Yes. Would it have helped for the short term? Maybe. Would I end up sitting in the nursery feeling worse that I already did? Most decidedly. I can say that without question: I would have sat in the nursery and cried over that bear like I would if Kaitlyn had just died yesterday. It would have brought back so many tactile memories. Kind of like when you smell the cologne of somebody who had passed away and it makes you sad. I have one of my granddad's pipes on our mantle, and its the same way. It smells just like him and I know he smoked it, but now being 25 years on the other side of it the pipe is not an anchor to my sadness at 4 years old when he passed away. Now it is just a reminder of him, and it does bring back some memories of my granddad when I smell it. And yes, it does make me a little sad. But I don't dissolve into tears when I smell that pipe. That pipe doesn't feel like my granddad's arms around me, or sound like his words when I sat on his lap. It's just a reminder of who my granddad was, and I already have quite a few things around the house that remind me of who Kaitlyn was.