S Stuffing and Scars

I was eight years old when I first saw her.

She sat in the window of a little boutique in Hungary, a teddy bear in a red skirt, a little tartan collar and pockets to match, black socks and red shoes on her small stuffed feet. Her white underdress peeked out from underneath, just slightly.

I wanted her the way children want things before they learn to talk themselves out of wanting. Completely. Without condition.

My name day was coming. Every name has its day on the Eastern European calendar. It is like a quieter birthday, a softer celebration, but still yours. Still a day when someone might listen. I asked my mother to gift me the bear. She said no. I asked again. The answer was again: no.

So I understood, eventually, resigned that she will not be mine, and I walked out of the shop and minded my own business the way children do when they’ve already learned not to push too hard.

She was chatting with the boutique owner. I waited by the car.

When she came out, we sat in the car, and she handed me her handbag and asked me to hold it on my lap. She positioned it, deliberately, so I could see the small bear head poking out from the top. The red skirt. The little tartan collar.

I was over the moon.

Not just because of the bear. Because my mum had listened. Because for once, I had asked for something specific and real and it had been heard. I felt seen. I felt important. I felt like a child who mattered.

I kept her for twenty-seven years.

A few months ago, she fell from the shelf. I was reading. I wasn’t paying attention. By the time my partner noticed, the dog had already done what dogs do, pulled her apart on the living room’s floor. The red skirt. The stuffing. The small black socks scattered.

I was not angry. I was not even shocked. I was just gutted. Grief, pure and ridiculous and real, was flaming up in me, horribly painful and intensive.

My partner said we would find someone to fix her. Make her better than before. And I sat on the bed and cried anyway, tears falling onto the duvet, because I knew what she was. I had always known, without ever saying it out loud.

She was me.

She was the child I had been, the one who stood quietly outside a boutique and hoped to be heard. The one who had survived everything, stayed whole, stayed pristine looking from the outside through three decades and two countries and every destruction that came for her.

She was the totem of my inner child, the symbol of a love that arrived too rarely but arrived, once, in a red tartan-collared skirt.

And now she was in pieces. And I was, too.

After minutes of inconsolable crying, I sat up.

I made a vow, not aloud, not dramatically, just quietly, to myself and to her remains on the floor.

“_I will put you back together. Not as you were. You will have mismatched seams and crooked limbs and places where the stuffing doesn’t quite sit right. You will have scars. You will have evidence of surviving. But you will be whole again, in your own new way.”

Because I am doing the same.

I am putting myself back together after a mistreated childhood, years of financial abuse, depression that lasted decades, many suicide attempts, addiction to antidepressants that meant to save me, domestic abuse, rape, losses and goodbyes of loved ones. I will never be smooth again. I will never be what I was before, before any of it.

But I will be stronger. I will be different. I will be something that has been broken and repaired and is not ashamed of the repair.

And she will sit on my shelf again, my little bear in her red skirt, with her stiches as scars showing. And she will be the most honest thing I own.

And I will be better than I ever was, because I did something for myself, and that was a simple thing: I chose myself and I chose healing.