31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #15—Mend a Grover

Hollie with her Grover, me with my Grover.

So, here's the thing:

When I was a kid, my stuffed animal of choice was my Grover doll. But it went beyond "favorite toy." An attempt at saying the word "Grover" was one of my first attempts at speaking, period, and it came out something like "Goh-dee-goh." When I got older, I was pretty much 96% sure that my doll was alive. I worried that Grover couldn't eat on his own, so I would smash soft foods against his lips and give him sips of water (to the point that his head would sometimes be completely waterlogged). You can still see faint stains on his lips from chocolate pudding. 

I took Grover with me everywhere—on trips, to Grandma's house, to the store. I took him to college with me. I took him with me on my LDS mission to Tokyo, Japan. I didn't take him on my honeymoon, but he certainly had his place in our first apartment, and in every place we've lived in since. When I told my family I was seriously dating a man named Grover, my sister joked, "So, do you call him Goh-dee-goh?"

It is true how bizarrely unlikely and random it is that I would end up marrying the namesake of my first true love, and perhaps Dave's last name did give me that extra nudge of encouragement to send him a semi-cautious-flirtatious email after our first meeting each other, in spite of the fact that he was living in Ohio and I in Utah, with zero plans to ever happen to run into each other again. I'm so glad I did send that email, and I'm so glad that Dave was just as risky and adventurous in terms of long-distance love as I was. And that is maybe how the muppets brought us together?

(Side note: David once told me that he feels an extra special kinship to Grover because the two of them both have sort of sad, sleepy, droopy eyes. It is one of my favorite things about David, and I know I will watch for the same droopy eyes in our children.)

Dave's droopy Grover eyes, circa the time I first met him. What a mane, am I right? If it wasn't his surname that first got my attention, it was definitely all those gorgeous curls.

My Grover doll, 30 years of wear and tear later, still finding himself cuddled up next to a toddler in a crib on occasion.

Anyone with favorite dolls or toys will likely empathize with me about having these favorite friends undergo "surgeries" when a limb or an eye falls off, or a dog chews it up, etc. For my Grover doll, the result of so much love and so many washes (after getting peed on so many times) was that he would sometimes lose the pupils to his eyes. They would rub right off until his pupils were nothing more than a few black residue spots of paint. I remember periodically taking my Grover to my mom and asking her to draw his eyes back on so he could see again. All she would do was take a magic marker and freehand black pupils onto the white plastic eye disks, but to me it was legitimate healer's work.

Hollie's first injured toy—a ripped seam down her own Grover's back.

Last week, Hollie's Grover also got hurt. I'm not sure how it happened, but a seam popped in his back and all his poor little back stuffing started to come out. I found Hollie in a room with her little brush trying to brush the cotton off a few days later. I kept trying to hide Grover until I got around to sewing him back up, but Hollie always managed to find out where he was hidden and demand him back. In fact, seeing her Grover doll out of reach made her want him around even more, and the back gash expanded in the following days.

Tonight was the night I decided that Grover should finally undergo surgery. I inherited the sacred title of Master Mom Healer. I will make this doll whole again. And that is at least awesome enough to be Thing #15, in my opinion.

The surgery (avert your eyes, my squeamish muppet readers!).

A complete recovery is expected, after Hollie can cuddle some love back into him tomorrow morning.

My little patient acting brave for the camera.

Sometimes I don't really feel like a mom—I feel more like a kid who lives with her best friend and made a baby with him that we play with all day and makes sure she eats and sleeps and bathes. I know that that technically makes me a mom, but that doesn't mean I feel like a mom. When I remember how I saw my mom as a kid, I remember how invincible, brilliant, smart, wise, witty, safe, helpful, and all-knowing she was (and often still is). My mom could solve any problem. She made me feel safe and at home. I completely trusted her to draw eyes back on my magical living stuffed animals. She always knew what to buy at the store, she always knew how to fix us when we got sick or bruised up, and she was there for every nightmare, bad day at school, and hurt feeling. (She was much more than this, too, but when you're a kid you have a very limited perspective of life and the people in it.)

Anyway, I don't feel like that kind of person at all. When Hollie had a fever last month, David and I looked at each other in sheer helplessness. Taking her temperature was a joke. Watching her eyes weep in utter agony over how crummy she felt was heart-melting. Also, I never go to the store (Davey does all the shopping). I feel like I follow a different time schedule every day, and I often have no idea what to feed Hollie for lunch and end up foraging with her on cheese cubes, grapes, peas, and ripped up sandwich meat. Sometimes I am terrified that Holls's safety lies in my own imperfect and frequently clumsy hands. I don't feel at all like what I thought moms feel like.

But I admit: Sewing up Grover's back tonight made me feel like there is hope for me yet. Mending a favorite toy (using a needle and thread, no less—the very icon of domesticity!) at least makes me feel useful, even if it doesn't make me feel invincible.

So Thing #15: Mend a Grover = ACCOMPLISHED.