Bears Multiplied

The expanding beauty of context

Parents like when their kids and their friends’ kids get along. Social group symmetry was important to my mother and fine by me; I genuinely liked my parents’ friends’ kids, with one notable exception.

First, some context. My mother and D had been best friends since sixth grade. Despite this, and despite the fact D had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids, when D got married, she didn’t ask my mother to be one of her bridesmaids. You see, blonde D wanted only blonde bridesmaids, and my mom was a brunette. My mother said she’d felt slighted, but ultimately understood that D was simply being D.       

In 1955, within weeks of each other, my mother and D gave birth to daughters. There was me, and D’s baby, whom she named D, after herself. Privately, my family dubbed the pair Big D and Little D.

 Little D had what my mother called “emotional problems.” She would slap me across the face without provocation and make me watch while she pooped under the bushes in her front yard. Compulsory sleepovers occurred with terrible frequency until one time Little D did something egregious, like peeing my bed on purpose or refusing to stop tickling me, so my dad spanked her, putting an end to that particular torment.

Years passed. Little D was sent to boarding school, then college, which she  dropped out of go to marry a guy on disability after a motorcycle accident. They lived in a trailer. Little D’s life wasn’t at all what she’d envisioned, Big D told my mother, more than a little bitter.  

I thought about about the framed needlepoint above the toilet in Big D’s first-floor bathroom. It read “Gentlemen Please Be Seated.” Controlling, prissy, which I unkindly thought paved a path for appropriate comeuppance. My mother said it was simply Big D’s nature to want things “just so”. My mother scooted past Big D’s thorns to tend to her sadness. Compassion has a steadying hand. Big D softened. Their one-way friendship became more two-way, and endured.       

Years later, Little D got the notion to make hand-sewn miniature bears as gifts for life’s momentous events, like weddings and births. My mother ordered a Little D bear wearing a white eyelet apron and a bear in a tie and vest for me and Sam. Later, she bought a little bear in a matching white eyelet skirt for Hannah, and an even smaller one in blue overalls for Jake. When the triplets were born, there were three teeny bears in pink bibs, and for Micah, a teensy-weensy bear with a baby bottle. My mother was happy we made shelf space for Little D’s bears in every house we’ve lived in.

I know the original concept couldn’t have been simpler: to each bear, a corresponding Hurwitz. But when I consider Little D’s bears within the greater construct, as part of a multi-generational story encompassing ego, restraint, heartache, and radical kindness, they don’t just represent my nuclear family. They are my mom.