The Teddy Bear

When I was 14 I had to have my tonsils taken out. My mom and dad brought me a pink carnation and white teddy bear. I loved that bear. I always slept with it. One night I accidentally tossed it out of bed and it landed with its head against a space heater. I woke up and rescued it before it started a fire, but it has a toasted brown strip across the top of its head. The summer I was 16 I spent the entire summer with Frank and Linda. It drove my stepmother nuts that I continued to sleep with a teddy bear at that age. I slept on a folding bed in their living room. One morning when Linda left for work, she took the bear out of my arms and set it on the fireplace across the room. She thought I was asleep, but the moment she was out the door, I got up and retrieved my bear. Frank teased me about the bear constantly. He called it Fuzzy, even though I told him over and over that wasn't it's name, and said his brain had been fried on drugs. He also insisted it was a boy, but I said it was girl. He would hide it from me. He'd put it on a shelf up above the fridge, or in his gun safe, or sometimes he'd put it in his bed under the covers. I had to search for it so many times. This was just one of his ways of messing with my head. I had this idea that because mom and dad had given me that bear that Frank had no right to touch it. I eventually stopped sleeping with it and stashed it away. I ended up throwing it away a few years later, because it just had too much negativity attached to it.

Gaslighted

Several years ago I saw a movie called "Gaslight". It was made in 1944 and it's about a woman whose husband manipulates her into thinking she's crazy. The little things he did to push her to doubt herself and question her own feelings and intelligence felt so familiar.  As I watched the movie I began to see my father in the character of the husband. I understood more about how he'd manipulated me to get what he wanted. My teddy bear became one of the best tools he used to unbalance me.