My Personal Theory About Teddy Bears

This family used to live in Section 8 housing across the street from me. Many times I’d be sitting on the porch with my then-girlfriend, watching the kids running wild in the grass having fun, as kids do; when one boy’s mom, or maybe gramma (hard to tell) would appear at the door. I never saw this woman, an enormous muumuu-clad cube, without curlers in her hair. And I never heard her speak to the boy without saying the word “fuck.”

“Get the fuck in the house!” she’d bellow, with all the grace and dignity of a Kodiak beat in rut. Or “You need to clean your fucking room!” Or “I told you not to make so much fucking noise!”

One otherwise peaceful day, my girlfriend and I watched this boy stride from the apartment with a large, white teddy bear in his left hand. We watched the most remarkable performance: as he walked across the lawn, this boy would repeatedly punch his bear in the stomach. He’d step out with one foot, swinging his arms wide, then step with the other foot, bringing his arms together and punching the bear. Step, swing; step, punch. Step, swing; step, punch.

The combination was bizarre. He obviously cared enough for his bear to bring it with him, but also considered it something acceptable to punch. He didn’t show any apparent malice toward the bear; he just kept punching it, as casually as I’d slap my briefcase if distracted. He drove a doubled fist into his bear’s midsection casually, neutrally, like he was slapping his thigh with the music playing inside his head.

Martha Bear

In college, my girlfriend gave me not one, but two teddy bears, because she thought it cute seeing me hold them. I bestowed names and personalities upon both. Unlike the bears I had in childhood, which were mostly boy bears, these are both girl bears. Sarah Smack is (present tense) cantankerous and combative, ready to answer slights with swing fists, but frustrated because her soft paws make little difference. Martha Bear, by contrast, is demure and amiable, eager to talk out differences.

I still have both bears. And thus my postulation begins. As a boy, I don’t remember thinking my teddy bears, and other stuffed animals, were anything but inanimate objects. I gave them names, and imbued them with personalities, but I don’t remember not knowing they were toys, or that the personalities I granted them came from my brain. I’ve long since forgotten most of their names, sometime around the point I gave them away to my sister or neighborhood kids.

Their personalities returned whence they originated: my head.

Like the kid in Margery Williams’ classic childrens’ book The Velveteen Rabbit, my stuffed toys became real in exact proportion to how much I invested myself in them. Now, nearly twenty years after I received her from my college girlfriend, Sarah Smack remains real because I imbue her with reality which comes from myself. I give her identity, I give her reality, then I return love to the identity I have created.

I believe children, and perhaps to a lesser degree adults, bestow a portion of their own personalities onto teddy bears, or other suitable substitutes. I’ve seen adults do something similar with vehicles, craft projects, even their houses. We give these inanimate objects names, attribute personality characteristics, then love the thing we’ve created. But we know, fundamentally, we love the fiction which exists exclusively in our heads.

We’ve essentially located a nexus of ourselves externally, in our bear, truck, hobby, or whatever. Then we love that piece of ourselves. Children love bears, dolls, and toys, because doing so teaches us to love ourselves; adults keep doing likewise because we never stop needing to learn to love. Especially in today’s massively isolating technological environment, we constantly must re-teach ourselves how to love.

Except that kid across the street experienced Mom’s love as constant outbursts of verbal violence. So he expressed his love for the externalized piece of himself by holding it close, then punching its gut. Not long after seeing that, his family moved away; it’s been nearly a decade, and he’s probably verging on adulthood. I hope he doesn’t still love himself through displays of reckless violence.

We see teddy bears and other fluffy toys as childlike expressions of naïveté. But every day, I see adults engaged in self-destructive behaviors because they haven’t learned to love themselves. I truly believe more grown-ups could profit from hugging a teddy bear.