What One Giant, Costco-Sized Bear Taught Me About the Push and Pull of Life

I teared up in the donation parking lot the other day. 

Getting teary-eyed when I unload a trunk full of single socks, sticky plastic trinkets, and old books isn’t usually how I roll. When piles of bags, marked “for donation” with a Sharpie, begin to pile up in the garage, a Goodwill run usually brings a sense of relief, an exhale of respite. 

I’ve long clung to a couple of rules when it comes to decluttering the house: Does it bring me joy? (Marie Kondo). Has anyone used it in six months? (Oprah, I believe). It hasn’t been any different in my children’s room, not when they seem to grow out of clothes faster than I can do the laundry, and the fabric bin full of knick-knacks and baubles overflows onto the shelf, down to the floor, into lost corners of their shared bedroom. 

But Bear Bear was different. 

Bear Bear was a stuffed bear of gigantic, Costco-sized proportions. A gift for my first son at a baby shower a month or two before he was born, the stuffie was never not around. 

When I drove home from that same shower, Bear Bear sat in the backseat, buckled up next to decorative bags filled with tiny onesies and silicone giraffe teething rings. 

“That’s one big bear,” my husband said, cracking a smile. “And you buckled him in because—” 

“Because he’s about to become our child’s best friend,” I replied. 

Sandwiched between the guest bed and the baby crib, Bear Bear became a constant presence in the second bedroom of our single-story walk-up in San Francisco – and in all the cities and towns my family later called home. In Pacifica and in Oakland, in Seattle and then back in Oakland again, Bear Bear was always the first of the boxes we unpacked in the children’s room. Because with that bear came comfort and knowing, security and warmth.

By the time my older son finally named him Bear Bear—a fitting name for a stuffed animal of more-than double-sized dimensions—he had already made our bodies his home. We leaned into his round belly every night, reading through a stack of books and snuggling before the lights went out. Soon, our second son joined the family, and as the boys grew, their adventures with Bear Bear grew too. He joined them on sleepovers and on wild rides down carpeted stairs; his head held a collection of hats, his arms a storied scattering of LEGO creations and Hot Wheels alike. 

But Bear Bear was also there in the hard times, too. We leaned into him when we whispered good-bye to Great Grandpa over the phone and let him cradle us after the bad guys broke into the house one morning. That big old bear held their frustrations and their hurts when anger raged inside their little-boy bodies and when a deep sense of loneliness grew alongside stay-at-home pandemic orders. 

In every good and every hard thing, his peanut-colored body bore witness to a thousand different memories and to a million remaining tales untold. Maybe that’s why my children’s choice to let go of Bear Bear came as a surprise. 

One day, I walked in to find Bear Bear stuffed in the closet, another day to find him lying next to plastic bins of Christmas decorations in the garage. Each time, I moved him back upstairs – back to his corner in the bedroom, back to the spot we’d called his for the last couple of years. Each time, stuffing trailed after me, the holes under his right armpit and near his stomach constant open wounds my measly sewing skills couldn’t ever fully patch. 

It was until my younger son, now eleven, finally broke it to me that I understood. 

“You can give away Bear Bear now, Mama,” he said, tacking on a sentence about how he bet another little kid would love to call Bear Bear their own. 

“But it’s Bear Bear,” I mused, maybe just to myself or perhaps aloud to him. Maybe that’s when I understood the invitation: I had been invited to let go, to release from my grips the bear we’d long called our own.

As it goes, this push and pull, this catch and release, often becomes life’s constant refrain. We let go, and we let go, and we let go again – no sooner drawing and gathering in once again. We scooch our buns over and make space for new stories of love to unfold and enter in and expand our hearts, once again. Sometimes it’s most evident to me when it comes to parenthood, but it’s also real when my time at one church ends and the next one begins. I see it when old neighbors move away and new ones move in, and even when I write and publish a story and then open myself up to a story that hasn’t yet been told, that needs to be told. 

Maybe that’s part of what I realized when I stood in the donation parking lot that day. 

“Now that’s a bear!” The attendant exclaimed. He lifted Bear Bear out of the rolling blue cart and held him up toward the sky.

Yes, he is, I thought to myself. Yes, he is. 

And wiping my eyes, I drove out of the lot.