Back when my daughters were babies, my Pinterest boards were full of minimalism porn: white walls, vacuum-striped floors, zero sh*t on the counters. I craved nothing more than an empty house with a vase full of peonies as the sole decoration. Maybe my aspirations were too high, or a version of wishful thinking. But I really think I could have been a minimalist… if it wasn’t for the stuffed animals that now cover 90% of the surface area of our home. And I know exactly where the problem originated: my mother-in-law.
It started innocently enough. Minutes after the placenta exited my body, my mother-in-law sent us a bouquet of flowers, along with a pink teddy bear with “My First Teddy” embroidered on its foot. It was cute. It seemed harmless. But it’s the type of memory that has taken on the hue of a horror movie trailer. Mom receives an adorable teddy and places it in the nursery. But judging by the ominous music, the viewer knows something the mom doesn’t. Soon, her house will be full of stuffies. They will multiply, like a virus. And there’ll be nothing she can do to stop it.
I adore my mother-in-law. She came to stay with us for five days after each of our daughters was born. And rather than committing the stereotypical mother-in-law offenses like baby hogging or judging my mothering, she worked her butt off to clean our house from top-to-bottom, cooked four-course meals each night, and landscaped our yard. When she arrived at our house, my husband helped her unload countless Walmart bags from her truck. “We don’t need all of this stuff, Mom,” he said, rolling his eyes. She smiled knowingly, “Oh, you will.” And out of one of the bags, she pulled another stuffie.
Fast forward nine years, and my daughters sleep with at least 10 stuffies each. The large basket I bought to contain them all does not in fact contain them all. We have the long-ass snake stuffie that takes up the entire basket. My 7-year-old informs me we can’t donate it because she wouldn’t want it to get caught around the neck of a baby. There are the giant squishmallows that fit nowhere, and thus are used as pillows on my daughters’ beds. There are the life-sized unicorn stuffies from my sister-in-law. “I apologize in advance for the gift I’m sending,” she texted me. Was she? The unicorns now live in our guest bedroom, and whenever I suggest that we get rid of them, my daughters say, “But we love riding them down the stairs!”
Each time we visit, my mother-in-law sends us home with at least four new stuffies and two Beanie Babies from the collection she believed would make her rich one day. Every time, my husband tells her, “There’s no room in our suitcases.” “No problem!” she says. “I’ll ship them to you!”
So you can see why I was convinced my mother-in-law was fully to blame for our “issue.” But it wasn’t until one day at a gas station, when my daughter begged for a dusty, big-eyed, TY brand cat-corn stuffie, that I recognized I was an equal part of the problem. We had a long car ride ahead, and I couldn’t distract her with my phone as the battery was almost dead. And also, who doesn’t want a dust-covered stuffie that smells of gas station air freshener? Of course, I let her get it!
As I drove home with my gleeful daughters in the back seat, pleased with their efforts to con me into buying another stuffie, I realized that I easily purchased more polyester filled creatures than my mother-in-law. I bought Gray Bunny, the first stuffie to ever grace our home, and it’s been a downward spiral ever since. When my daughter asked if she could buy a Costco-sized pack of Easter Squishmallows (so cute!), I said yes. I bribe my daughters for flu shots and strep tests with a prize, which always turns out to be a stuffie. “Don’t you want some candy with red 40 and corn syrup instead?” I plead. No such luck.
Last strep test, we brought home a dog stuffie wearing a reindeer headband that danced in circles to an ear-splitting rendition of “Jingle Bells.” (The worst part is, I convinced my daughter to buy it because I thought it was so funny.) On road trips, when our legs are stiff and we have just a few more hours left to go, we stop at Cracker Barrel and inevitably leave with pancake-induced gut-rot and stuffed animals. One year for Christmas, I bought my daughter a gigantic, larger-than-human bunny stuffie. It also lives in the guest room with the unicorns.
Here’s the part of the essay where I’m supposed to wrap it up, and tell you something like, “These stuffies symbolize the stage of life we are in. And because it also includes dimpled hands, sweet hugs, and missing teeth, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” Instead, I’m calling bullsh*t. These stuffies are a problem I created. If we didn’t have this many stuffies, I might be a minimalist. In therapy, I learned a lot about my blind spots. And though my therapist never uncovered it, it turns out buying stuffies is one of them. Is this self-sabotage? Probably. Though I’m no mental health expert, in nursing school, we learned that denial is the most effective (short-term) coping mechanism.
So obviously, I’m going to keep blaming my mother-in-law and forget I ever reflected on this.
Laura Onstot started writing to maintain her sanity when she left her career as a research nurse to be a stay-at-home mom. Unfortunately, she realized writing only revealed her insanity. She is not humble at all, and finds her own writing very funny. She forces her friends to read every article she writes, because praise is her drug of choice. You can find more of her writing at lauraonstot.com.
