Catch me in the right mood, and this is an easy task. Out with the old, in with the new. Pitch the crap, donate the rest and good riddance. But catch me on a day when my three kids are full of love and whimsy, playing imagination games together just inside of ear shot and filling me with that familiar weepy ache that sails in with the waves of our vicious impermanence as this exact family, and, well, you’ll find me writing letters to plastic cups.
These toys, they tell more than one story.
Once upon a time I helped my firstborn tear you free from pretty wrappings at her first birthday party, a gift from my first mom friend. She was my manager’s wife, a thoughtful soul but painful introvert, a woman 5 years my junior (Our 20s! When 5 years meant something!) with vastly different interests and with whom I had little in common aside from the fact that we were each the first of our friends to grow a human and accept the imposing responsibility, the suffocating joy and the deep wells of fear that come with the title of mother. And so I learned the urgent necessity of creating a village. With stacky cups came teething tips, co-sleeping advice, body talk and welcome companionship.
We left one of your cups in England somewhere, the smallest one. It was lime green, and though I can see its precise shade so clearly, I no longer know what animal shape was featured along its side. I looked and looked for that lime green cup before we left England for good, feeling restless that anything at all had gone missing, grieving the asymmetry, the incompleteness of you. We must have dropped it on a walk or left in in a restaurant. It never resurfaced.
You can’t keep everything, you know.
A few weeks ago, my raucous 5-year-old boy picked up one of your cups and whipped it – hard – across the room. Stop! I shouted. Those cups are precious to me! We stared at each other in surprise, me not realizing I felt that way and he not yet understanding his mother’s neurosis or the depths of her love.
You see, Stacky Cups, for us you haven’t just moved mountains; you have been mountains. You have been funny hats and silly shoes, miniature drum kits, bright birthday cakes and missing teacups. You have been faces. You have been caldrons. You have been gears and cogs and seashells that sing like the English Channel when you hold them close. You have been tower after tower after tower, faithfully crashing, always reinventing.
You, you perfectly incomplete set of plastic stacking cups, you tell the geography of our comings and goings, the How Tos of my primitive mothering, our sweetest daydreams woven from milk breath and chubby fingers. A first child’s first birthday gift, you tell our beginning. The only baby toy to make the cut as I clear out my last child’s bin of teething rings and plastic keys, you also tell a certain and approaching end. The clop, clop, clop of one of your pieces stacked against another and tumbling down sounds, if you do the right kind of listening, an awful lot like a human heart – mine.