Mo Kim

In the beginning, there was Doris, and it was lit.

Sure, I’d had stuffed animals before: ever since I’d told my 10th grade homeroom that I liked them, every Secret Santa exchange, Teacher Appreciation Week, and birthday yielded countless new plushie friends. Sure, some of them endeared themselves enough to earn names and prime real estate on my dresser. But none captured my heart enough for me to consider them more than toys, much less my children or part of my family.

At first, Doris was just another one of them: a pandemic purchase, a sweet baby dolphin I couldn’t help but buy in the throes of shelter-in-place ennui. For two years, she sat on my bookshelf, nameless and wordless.

That all changed the weekend in July that my then-boyfriend, JT, came over and saw her, tucked in between a stuffed watermelon and a giant reindeer.

“OMG,” he squealed, “is that a dolphin?!”

Our love affair with Doris took off as quickly as our love affair with one another (by our first anniversary, we were unpacking boxes in an empty living room). We named her “Doris L. Fin,” like dorsal fin, and began snoogling her to sleep every single night. With each weekend visit and Sunday afternoon perched on the sofa in between us, she started taking after her parents and developing a personality, demanding that we play with her, starting to crack inside jokes, and swimming away whenever we told her it was bath time (aka wiping her down with wet wipes).

Really, she was just the beginning. Slowly, scouring the Bellzi website for sales and new additions became part of our morning ritual. When we had to be apart because of family or travel, one of us always took Doris with us to keep her warm. And finally, last spring, we bit the bullet and got her a little brother:

Despite Doris’ initial protests, our family of plushies has quickly grown to over twenty kids now–now there’s Finneas the mini-dolphin, Penelophe the elephant, Beetrice the bee, and most recently Hamilton the pig. (They also have trading cards.) It’s always the same: when they come, they are silent. We take a few hours, even days, to figure out what their name is. And then, like magic, they come to life. The old siblings welcome the new ones, inviting them to play and go on adventures; the new ones slowly emerge as fully-realized beings, all with unique quirks and traits and noises (my favorite noise is from Beetrice, who loves to yell “POLLEN!”). They watch TV with us. They hang out everywhere, from the bookshelf to my home office. And when we go to bed, they vie for our attention, begging us to snoogle them to sleep.

They’ve also shown up for us in the big moments. Sometimes, on the stressful days, I take one of my kids to work: lately, Penelophe has been spending a lot of time getting to know my colleagues and giving them boops to cheer them up. When JT decided to spend a month traveling through Asia last spring, he took Doris with him. When we couldn’t be physically together, I could always count on daily text updates capturing all of her adventures, from visiting a hot spring to meeting her real-life marine siblings at the Osaka Aquarium. Eight months later, when we got married, we asked our close friend to custom-make some traditional Korean and Chinese outfits for five of our children. They had the most important job: they greeted everybody who came to the reception!

I’m surprised that it’s now, at the age of 29, that I’ve embraced my love of stuffed animals. When I was younger, I had no toys or animals to call friends–I mostly admired cute things from a distance, knowing I didn’t have the money or space to give them the home they deserved. Part of me yearned for that space to play and imagine, even as part of me wanted to reject it as childish. It feels joyous, and even healing, to come full-circle and realize I can now fully embrace these desires and share them with people I love.

(On a side note, I also think I want to study this as an academic subject in the future. I’ve got Janet Hoskin’s Biographical Objects on my to-read list: I’m curious about the ways we tell stories about ourselves through the objects we own and the ways in which we personify them. I probably need to do more research on this, but it’s a topic and question I think is worth learning about!)