YO MAMA: The lasting joy of well-loved toys
OPINION
In the winter of 1962, a little girl saw a velveteen horse in the window of a Montreal gift shop. He was the steed from all her favourite story books and fairytales brought to life. As the shop was near her home, she checked the window display often to see if he was still there. He was the only one in the store.
The little girl saved and saved. She earned a weekly allowance of 25 cents for shovelling the front steps and taking the garbage out. It would have taken many weeks to save up enough for the horse in the window. Luckily, her birthday was coming up.
She could hardly believe her eyes when she opened her birthday gift. There he was, with his long, silky mane and smooth coat. She named him Prince.
Every night, the girl took off Prince’s leather bridle and saddle and put him to sleep in the homemade cardboard stable she made for him and kept right beside her bed. This must be what author Margery Williams meant in The Velveteen Rabbit when she wrote of a stuffed animal’s ability to become real through the love of its owner.
Many years passed, and the girl got older. She carried Prince around in moving boxes, never leaving him behind.
Prince was carefully packed up in a Rubbermaid bin with other mementos and family heirlooms when he arrived at my house earlier this year. My mom thought her young grandson might want to play with him.
Prince came out of the bin a little tattered, with a button sewn on for one of his lost eyes and some of his straw stuffing sticking out. His leather bridle and saddle had long since disappeared. Despite his appearance, and perhaps because of it, he had a magical quality about him. One could tell, simply by looking at him, that he was one-of-a-kind.
My mom fell into a kind of trance as she told me the story of how he came to be hers. She remembered it all so vividly; the store window, the little cardboard stable, the make-believe adventures. I caught a glimpse, then, of her as a child. It was there in the familiar way her hand wrapped around Prince’s back and galloped him around the living room.
My son giggled with glee when Prince nuzzled his arm. We fed him some carrots then put Prince up on a shelf in the nursery with another well-loved stuffie from my husband’s childhood.
Some weeks later, we brought a load of garbage to the landfill. As we dumped out our cans, I looked down into the huge dumpster to see dozens of toys strewn about in the garbage and the sludge. A plastic dollhouse lay on its side, crushed by the weight of a broken office chair. The rainbow horn of a cheap-looking white unicorn poked out from underneath a tattered pillow. Plastic trucks and toys with broken buttons lay amid the waste.
I thought of Prince with his patched up eye and the spots where his velvet coat had been worn through from too much love. I am so glad he was saved for all those years.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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