When my daughter first met Bear she was only a few months old. Although my wife and I called him Bear from the beginning, he was known as “mnguh” by my daughter. This was true even when her phonetic ability was such that she could easily pronounce the word bear. As she reached two-years-old, only then did she even consider exchanging his name with Bear.

From day one, Bear was attached to her mouth. She would suck and chew on his nose for comfort and to help her go to sleep. As time went on, Bear’s nose became, how do I put it … totally disgusting. As she got older and began to eat food other than her mother’s milk, that food got transferred to Bear’s nose. Bear’s nose went from a cute white nose, to a brown stinky snout.

It got to the point that we had to wash Bear every other day or worry that something nasty would grow on his nose and make her sick. Through the frequent washing, and also my daughter’s tendency to literally chew on his snout, a hole appeared underneath his chin and above his snout. The holes quickly got worse, and stuffing started to come out of him. Since the material was so frayed, we didn’t really have the option of sewing him back together.

The only option left to us was to replace him. My wife and I looked everywhere for a new “Bear,” but he had been discontinued years ago. After an extensive search on the Internet, including eBay and some obscure collector sites, we gave up looking for him. That left us with only one option, Bear had to go.

My wife and I talked about how to best get rid of Bear and how we thought my daughter would handle it. As we discussed it, we had visions of screaming and crying as we took Bear away from her. We would soon become the meanest parents ever. After talking about it off and on, and not being able to come up with a good solution, the idea hit me one night to just have her say goodbye to Bear.

The other night, as I was getting my daughter ready for bed, I saw Bear laying on the living room floor looking as nasty as ever. My wife was putting our 2-month-old son to sleep in the back, and I knew that I had to seize the moment. I snatched up Bear and asked my daughter to come over and sit on my lap. I explained to my almost 2 ½-year-old daughter that Bear was broken, and that we needed to say goodbye to him. She looked at him with a serious face, and then pulled him close to her face and kissed him on the large gaping hole beneath his chin. She then stuck her nose up to his snout, took one last sniff — as if to save a sensory memory of his existence — and then pushed him away, and said, “Goodbye Bear.”

Suddenly, she jumped out of my lap and ran back to her room. I got up and walked to her room and found her clutching a much larger stuffed animal (a puppy dog). I asked her if she wanted to sleep with the doggy, and she said yes. So I placed him in her crib, and said that she could sleep with him instead of Bear. She seemed content with the change.

The story isn’t over yet. This morning she asked my wife for Bear. She replied that Bear had to go away, because he was broken. She replied, “Bear, come home.” Only time will tell.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Grief and Loss, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.