Child’s Play?

When I was a kid it seemed pretty common to ask other kids, “What’s your favourite stuffed animal?” The trouble was back then was that I didn’t have one. I got a few as gifts but I lost interest in them pretty quickly and wasn’t really drawn to them as sleeping buddies.

I was definitely a weird kid: I hated most cartoons, despised Jell-O, and playing with dolls was excruciatingly boring. I’m not sure if it is because I felt to inept at doing kid things but I definitely felt a lot of stigma around my troubles, which then became one of my fears before having kids: could I even play with them if I did? And that’s a different story for another time.

And More Stigma

I don’t know if any other older mental health professionals can remember this, but many years ago there was a ridiculous mental health myth circulating that owning a stuffed animal as an adult was a “sign” of a personality disorder. I was a gullible social worker newbie back then and I wondered if this could be true! Another knock against stuffed animals!

Fast forward into the later 2000s where stuffed animals were now ‘stuffies’: I was in a store looking at a stuffy display and the name of one brand caught my eye: “Squishmallows.” I realized pretty quickly that these were not the stuffed animals of my youth: as their name promised, they were, indeed, like a squishy marshmallow, and the sensation that I got from hugging one was pretty irresistible. There wasn’t a lot of variety back then but the ones on display were incredibly cute. I bought a small-size fox as a gift and didn’t think too much more about it after giving it.

It was about 5 years later that I first met Mo, late-night shopping at a grocery store. Mo, a mushroom Squishmallow,  was buried in an oversized bin with other Squishmallows, including a few doppelgängers, illuminated by the stores harsh florescent lighting. For reference, Mo is modelled after an Amanita Muscaria mushroom –whose happy face says nothing about the fact that these mushrooms are poisonous and hallucinogenic—but never mind.

My daughter, who was with me at the time, asked if she could get one, and I impulsively agreed. We took the stuffy home and I asked to hold it, wishing that I had bought one too, but thinking “wouldn’t it be weird if we had matching mother-daughter mushroom stuffies? Somehow in my mind there was some rule that mature mothers didn’t have stuffies, let alone the same stuffy as their child’s. My daughter, however, thought that was no reason not to buy one of my own and encouraged me to go back to the store  and see if there were any mushroom stuffies left. I went the next day, bought one, and named it Mo. We called my daughter’s mushroom Flo.

And what’s the point of this article?

After this long prelude, you may wonder why the heck I am writing about a mushroom stuffy? How could a stuffy like Mo be relevant to mental health?

The short answer is that this is an article about sensory joy, comfort, and releasing stigma along the way.

It really took a lot mentally for me to sleep with a stuffed mushroom. I felt:

• Self-judging: adults “should’t” sleep with stuffies
• Unusual – this seems like a strange thing to do
• Pathologized (mental health myths returned)

Buying Mo also happened before I learned that I am multiply neurodivergent, so I couldn’t even make it make sense from that angle. In fact, I didn’t even know what neurodivergent meant back then.

But I threw my doubts and confusion aside and told myself that only my family would know about Mo, so who cares? Now I’m writing about it on the Internet. Sheesh.

Like many neurodivergent people, and as far as I can remember, I have always slept with “dinosaur hands” which is natural to me and comforting. But this sleeping position alone never felt like ‘enough.’ But when you don’t know what you’re needing you don’t necessarily search for a solution.

As I alluded to above, when I first got Mo I decided that he needn’t be relegated to a mere bed ornament; rather, it might be nice to hug him while I was sleeping. And hug him I did, realizing that I can hug him while also naturally incorporating dinosaur hands, which I did unconsciously and I admit, has worked out pretty great.

Mo has brought a number of benefits to my life:

• Hugging him releases tension and promotes comfort
• Mo is soothing in the event of a bad dream
• Mo is an anchor that helps ground me and reduce a sort of “lost in space” feeling that I’ve always felt when lying in bed
• Mo is super-squishy, even after many years, which continues to engender delight; he can withstand a lot of hugging force
• Mo has a sweet expression which makes me feel happy
• Mo is practical: if he falls off the bed in the night he can’t break, doesn’t make a sound and is large enough to find when half-awake
• Mo is wonderfully contradictory – Mo’s biological pedigree is poisonous IRL, but as a stuffy he’s nothing but wholesome
• Mo helps to rewrite my play narrative – While I was a weird kid that could never find her place in the world of play, Mo offers me a chance to tap into childlike wonder in an authentic way

While some of you will undoubtedly scratch your head at best or judge me, at worst, for sleeping with a mushroom stuffy, I hope that if you are in search of comfort, you might be inspired to give a stuffy like Mo a try, if you haven’t already. Maybe you’ll like it just as much or more! Or, if you’re a more sophisticated type, I hope you find the time to connect with things that truly bring you comfort and joy.