For some excellent reasons, things between me and Beaut have reached a bit of a hiccup. My understanding and acceptance of these reasons does not diminish my disappointment. But, such is life, and I’ll just have to suck it up, drop 10lbs, look and feel fabulous and continue blogging my trainwreck life story.
At the start of this Beaut saga, I’d carefully and kindly placed my three teddybears in my closet because it felt weird to have them on my bed when Beaut came over, and because I thought it was time to turn a chapter from girlhood to womanhood. Real women don’t sleep with teddybears, so I’ve been told. For the past few months, every time I opened my closet door, my favorite teddybear, Mimi Nafiss (yes, he has a first and last name, teddybears deserve the same privilege as humans, don’t you think?), who has been in my life since I was christened at 38 days old, would look at me from his perch on the shelf with reproachful eyes. He didn’t say anything, but he gave me that look, the look of “I see you as you really are, and you are disappointing me, and hurting my feelings. Your priorities suck.” I would quickly close the closet door, to avoid his sad eyes. I told myself: I am 31 years old. I can do this. I can not talk to my teddybears in my head. I can go through life without a daily snuggle with my teddybears. I am a grown-ass woman.
The first thing I did upon acknowledging the Beaut hiccup was drink a bottle of wine. Not true, but that sounds dramatic and typically female. What I actually did when I accepted the hiccup was to go to my closet and pull out my teddybears -the next best thing to calling up my mommy and being told soothing, reassuring lovely thoughts. My teddybears immediately brought me back to my more serene place, one where as a child I felt loved and safe.
Growing up as an only child, Mimi was my best friend. I gave him a voice and a personality, he was my partner in crime. He was my son, and his father had been my mother’s childhood teddybear, who’d died a tragic death in a dumpster. My mother would invent fantastic adventures for Mimi, impersonating his voice. She sent me report cards written by his teachers at school, emphasizing his behavioral problems: apparently, he once attempted to avoid eating his broccoli at lunch time, by hiding it in a glassful of milk. At supper time, he would ask to have some dessert too, since he was part of the family, which I would helpfully eat for him. By the time I was a teenager, my mother and I had become addicted to Mimi, and would continue embroidering his story. My family thought we were weird. We were.
As I snuggled with Mimi and his two teddybrothers, feeling blue and down, Mimi whispered, “See? That is what you get when you seek anything less than the unconditional love of a teddyson.” My negative paranoid brain (for a full introduction to this charming side of my personality, read this post) smirked at me, “Loser! Here you are, you couldn’t even get this Beaut thing off the ground, and now you are back to talking to your teddybears?! And you think you are ready to date. Right. As if any guy, who knew how crazy you actually are, would stick around. Keep talking to your teddybears, woman. That’s right. Pathetic.” I was too sad to try deal with my paranoid brain – I couldn’t exactly find any counterarguments as to how talking to my teddybears would make me attractive dating material. Which is when Mimi reared up his teddybear head, and looked at me with his indignant teddybear eyes: “Hey! You listen to me, you. Mimi is fidèle. Vanilla-mama needs to learn to never settle for anything less than a guy who comforts her as much as Mimi does. Mimi has stuck with Vanilla-mama from the beginning, and has seen everything she has lived, and Mimi knows she will be ok. Mimi is here when she is sad. Beaut isn’t. The previous boy neither. The one before that neither. If those boys can’t even match up to a teddybear, they aren’t really worth worrying about, no? Shut up, paranoid brain. Mimi is enjoying these cuddles, so leave us alone.”
Surprisingly, my paranoid brain did leave us alone.
Discovering ratchet 
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