8: To {become} Real.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"REAL isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, ling time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.

 "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all,

because once you are Real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand."

-Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

This was one of my FAVORITE childhood books. I remember my Mom reading it to my sisters and I before bed, and crawling into bed with a sad, but good feeling.

I knew what Real was. I knew it.

Ever since I could remember, I'd slept with a polar bear named "Snowy" (original, right?) and a yellow bordered "blankie." Every night, they were there, in my bed. I slept with Snowy tucked under one arm and blankie twisted somewhere around me and in the sheets.

Snowy and Blankie were a fixture in my bed until (dare I say), I got married.

I swear. Even ask my college roomies...or Gary.

It wasn't like I cried when I had to spend a night without them, or sucked my thumb while holding them each night. They were just always "there," I had no reason not to keep them around...

I had changed houses, dorms, apartments and beds but thier feel and smell stayed familiar.

Once Gary and I got married and moved in together, and his fabulous California King sized bed became "our bed" Snowy and blankie moved from inside the bed, to the side of the bed, nestled between the headboard and my bedside table. Gary, of course made fun of me--kind heartedly, calling Snowy "dirty" and blankie a "rag," but never once ordered me to put them (or throw them) away.

I still have them, not in our bed or our room even. I couldn't bear to box them up like rejected toys, so I just store them up in Kai's closet with some other random artifacts of Gary and mine, that Kai may take interest in some day.

And as I revisit this passage, several years later, it still moves me...but differently now, at 26.

Snowy and blankie now sit, worn and proud, in the closet.

And just as they became real to me,
I now fall asleep in the arms of my husband,
and wake up each each morning to a love more {real} than the day before.

In laughter, tears, good times and bad...

Love {becomes}.

"I suppose you are real" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.

But the Skin Horse only smiled.