In a well-worn story of my youth, the main character is, of course, me. But as I retold the story, it could be my Dad. Or my Mom. Or my stuffed tiger, who, at the age I was at the time this story was not yet a story, but a series of events that hadn’t assumed their full narrative shape, was still a plausible main character to me.
I loved that tiger. It was soft before we had the word plush and today’s stuffed animals that are so impossibly soft that you stop and nestle them against your face even when you have no small children to shop for. It was the perfect size to hold in my arms, to rest next to my pillow. It was happy to share its life with the 30 or so other stuffed animals in my menagerie, a peaceful and colorful kingdom which contained unicorns and horses and a four-foot long cobalt blue and green snake with a yellow felt collar and the really ugly stuffed kangaroo I sewed in Home Ec – with a fake satiny fabric with what looked like black record discs on a white background and was ever-so-not-kangaroo-shaped and even if I’d sewn it better would have only been kangaroo-like if you held the thing on its side, as the teacher’s cut-outs were one-dimensional.
The action in the story centers around my parents attending a theme party. They were part of a group of friends, 12 couples who met 4 times a year, rotating responsibility for planning and hosting among groups of 3 couples, so that every few months everyone would go do something really fun, yet the work of it never became overwhelming. When my folks hosted, my brother and I would sit on the stairs leading to the upstairs bedrooms and watch. We’d be allowed to stay downstairs to say hello to everyone, to snack on the food, to marvel at the costumes. We knew the grown-ups, we knew their kids. The evenings were filled with laughter and stories and grown-ups having fun without doing anything which would turn into a story of regret or dysfunction. It was wholesome, but not corny. This was an amazing group of people who knew how to laugh and play well into adulthood. None of the kids from any of the families ever complained about the parties being lame, there was no shared embarrassment or humiliation in a party’s aftermath. No affairs, no drinking problems, no spouse swapping; nothing destructive.
Until the story picks up with my tiger and my Dad. For this party, the theme was childhood. The hosts asked the other guests to come dressed as children, and had an entire night of childhood-themed food and games and music. It was destined for greatness. My Mom figured out what she and my Dad would wear, a dynamic that exists to this day. My Dad wanted to bring one of my stuffed animals, and we all thought this would be cute. He came into my room, scanned the piles of colorful animals, and his eyes fell on the tiger. What ensued was the kind of power struggle that usually occurs when at least one person is acting like a child, but in this case, we both were. I didn’t want him to take my favorite tiger; I was worried it would get hurt. He knew nothing bad would happen and thought my objections unfounded. I offered him all of the other animals, the good ones not just the ugly kangaroo. No, he wanted only my tiger. I whined, pouted, argued to the limits of my underdeveloped mind. He whined, pouted, argued to the limits of his mind. He won.
Both he and my Mom reminded me of my selfishness. How I had so many animals that it was unreasonable for me not to offer the tiger. There is no argument to counter the “you’re being selfish” silencing dictum. Disagree – “No, I’m not!” – and you are, at that moment, acting selfishly. Deflect – “Nuh uh, you are” – and you are now not only selfish, you are critical of the other. Agreement is only possible 30 years and 300 psychotherapy hours later – “Of course you’re right, Parent of mine. I am a child with a child’s mind and a child’s sensibility and, yes, I am putting a self-protective boundary around something dear to me. Thank you for this opportunity to assert my Self.”
Off they went to their great night of fun; off I went to brood and stew in my tiger-less room. Eventually I fell asleep, and in the morning I went downstairs to retrieve my tiger and hear the stories not just of the party but of how misplaced my misgivings were. I padded to the kitchen table, on which sat a paper grocery bag.
Sticking up from within were my tiger’s ears! I rubbed my eyes and was simultaneously delighted to see him and frustrated that my parents were right. “See?” I told myself with my internalization of their combined parental voice. “Nothing happened.” I walked past the table and in to the kitchen. Opened the refrigerator door, pulled out the gallon jug of 1% milk, headed over to the cabinets to get a glass and I stopped. Something wasn’t right. My parents hadn’t left with a grocery bag.
I peered into the bag. My tiger’s head and ears and were at the top, but the face didn’t look right. His legs and body and tail were flat and deflated, the furry skin resting on top of mounds and mounds of stuffing. The bag was filled with stuffing, its insides taking up so much more space in the grocery bag than they ever had when they filled him from the inside.
So this is the story. At this child-themed party, the first person my Dad saw was Denny, the most handsome of the fathers in this group. The most handsome of all the fathers I knew. Tall and lean, with the easiest smile and a willingness to spend more than 3 seconds talking to kids in their awkward years. Denny came as the playground bully. Denny greeted my Dad on the walkway heading in to the house and, without warning, without thought, without plan, tore the tiger out of his arms, pulled every last coarse carpet-like fiber out from the body. He did a little bully dance while he did so. He was flawlessly in character, enjoying the violence with a glee that stage actors feel when they’ve tapped ever-so-perfectly into the role.
Denny made his triumphant entrance as the school-yard bully; my father, without my father having a chance to know what was happening before it was too late, entered the house and the party in a kind of confused victimization. It wasn’t really his tiger, so nothing dear to him had been ruined. It was Denny doing something that tall, lean handsome popular boys have always done: upstage the pudgier, less attractive, less masculine ones, but using humor and tomfoolery and hijinks so that it’s hard to hold a grudge.
So who, really, is the main character? The father who bullied his daughter to give him her favorite toy, then lost it to a better bully. The father who feels shame for so many other, larger, one-upmanships that he has he doesn’t retell Story #8, the one about him bringing his daughter’s favorite now un-stuffed tiger home in a bag from a the Let’s-Be-Kids-for-a-Night party.
Me? The daughter who learned to squelch her voice not because it was wrong, but because all she had to do was sit tight and her worst fears would come true, even when everyone around her told her she was making too much of things, took things too seriously, didn’t trust enough that others knew better. The girl at that awkward age where she knows she’s getting too old for stuffed animals but isn’t ready to leave them behind, the girl who never outgrew all her awkwardness?
Denny? The man for whom, to this day, I hold the small girl crush that I held back then, a longing that signals desire for the more powerful male, the one who bested my father, the one brimming with virility, the one who might have been man enough to take the kangaroo.