Separation Anxiety: It’s Not Just for Toddlers

I’m a grown woman — okay, a woman who belongs to AARP — who sleeps with a stuffed animal.

For most of my life, I didn’t feel the need to clutch a small, cuddly toy to make it through the night. But now I’ve come full circle, and don’t mind people knowing.

The first stuffed animal I loved was “Rabbit.” He was no beauty, even when he was new. He had short yellow fur on his face, arms, and legs, and an odd red-and-white-checked pattern on his chest and on the inside of his floppy ears. But Rabbit kept me safe every night.

We would hang together under the covers when my parents threw their frequent raucous parties. The sounds of glasses clinking, high-pitched women’s laughter, men’s loud, commanding voices, along with the smell of cigar and cigarette smoke would waft up the stairs and into my bedroom. Rabbit and I would confer under the sheets to make sense of it.

When my mom was drunk and mean, Rabbit understood. We had an imaginary, protected world. Rabbit and I threw our own parties in my canopy bed, to which we invited my other, less cherished, stuffed animals. Once, when my Dad came in to say goodnight, he asked what was going on under the covers.

“We have a night club,” I explained.

My Dad laughed and laughed. I didn’t understand that to him “night club” conjured up The Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center or The Stork Club, packed with movie stars and celebrities sipping martinis.

The Cold War hit its peak when I was a child. In elementary school we routinely did drills for nuclear attacks. We left our classrooms after closing the windows, and sat in lines along the hallway walls, heads between our knees, hands clasped behind our necks, presumably to protect them from flying glass.

The Cuban Missile Crisis hit at the same time a popular commercial for pull-out couches was airing on New York radio stations. The company, “Castro Convertible,” had the following jingle:

“Who’s the first to conquer living space — it’s Castro Convertible!”

Well, I’d already learned about the space race — John Glenn had orbited the earth in early 1962. And certainly I’d heard of Castro. Fidel Castro was a communist who hated America. When I heard the ad playing repeatedly on the radio, I was terrified. Castro now wanted to conquer all of living space! Everything was conflated in my young mind.

But Rabbit and I figured it out. At night, anytime we heard a plane overhead (which was fairly frequent as we were in the flight path of Kennedy — then Idlewild – and LaGuardia Airports), we assumed it was Castro, ready to drop bombs. But Rabbit and I worked out that if we lay perfectly still, not moving a muscle and holding our breath, Castro wouldn’t see us and would fly somewhere else.

Looking back, I see this was one just sign of a burgeoning anxiety disorder. But back then, if I expressed fear, I was told to “stop being such a worrywart!”

Anyway, Rabbit was my constant comfort growing up. By the time I was a young teenager, Rabbit was in a state akin to the late-stage Velveteen Rabbit. He’d been sewed up so many times that the stitches wouldn’t hold, and his stuffing burst from the seams. Almost all his fur had worn off. He’d lost his nose to an aggressive dog and one eye to an incident I can no longer remember.

At some point, I stopped sleeping with Rabbit. He moved to the top of my bureau. Of course, he did not accompany me to college, let alone graduate school. I don’t recall having him when I moved to my first apartment, or second, or third. Most likely, he was my parents’ attic for decades. Eventually, though, Rabbit made his way to the house we live in now. I put him on a high shelf in the bedroom closet and rarely thought about him for the next three decades.

Six years ago, I got sick with something doctors couldn’t diagnose. My stomach was in a constant state of rebellion. I had no appetite. When I did eat, I couldn’t digest my food. I needed IV fluids for hydration. I lost too much weight.

My father, who I adored, had died recently, after a long decline into dementia, so maybe I was mourning. I was fighting with my mother, so maybe it was stress. I’d been to Peru, so maybe it was a parasite. They never did figure it out and I gradually recovered.

But one day in the midst of it, when I was too weak to get out of bed, my husband came to the bedroom door. He had something behind his back.

“I don’t know if I’ve done a good thing or a bad thing,” he said. “But I got you something.”

He held out a sock monkey. I burst into tears. The thing about Sock Monkey (you can see I haven’t evolved in naming my stuffed animals) is that he has almost the exact same size torso as Rabbit did. Holding him, I felt a peace come over me that I hadn’t experienced in years. It felt so right in a literal, physical way. Sock Money was an incredible comfort.

I know about transitional objects, usually soft or cuddly items that help children with separation anxiety. Rabbit was clearly one for me. And evidently, so is Sock Monkey. I still sleep with him.

Does this make me regressive and pathetic? I don’t think so. And I don’t really care. Sock Monkey has seen me through my little brother’s death, my best friend’s death, my mother’s slow decline, Covid, the state of our country, and myriad other things that spike my anxiety.

In my mind, being an adult — especially an older one — is one long haul of separation anxiety. You constantly lose those things and people you were attached to, be it people you’ve loved, jobs that gave you meaning, or your own physical wellbeing.

Rabbit currently lives in a shoe box, wrapped in archival paper that is meant to preserve him — at least a little longer. I bring him out on his birthday — Easter- and put a little crown, made long ago out of construction paper, on his head for the day. But I’m nervous exposing him to too much air, and I certainly don’t want my cats getting a hold of him.

Sock Monkey is still robust, though sprouting a few random threads from his seams. The stuffing is one arm is a little wonky.

I know that they are both just an assemblage of cloth and stuffing. But I also know they are something more. Rabbit and Sock Monkey have provided solace for countless days and nights.

And in a world that still finds me anxious and confounded — even at this stage of my life — that’s an enormous gift.