a week ago i got back from a trip visiting my brothers. in that time i brought my son, a tiny wooloo stuffed animal i named mutton. i love mutton dearly, but when i got back from my trip i was mega sick from what i believe to be covid and in my brain fog i think i thought i had just forgotten to unpack him every night before going to sleep when i usually find him to cuddle him.
my boyfriend stayed over last night and when i was going to sleep i went to go show him mutton because that's a thing i do and i joke that he gets to visit his son, but i couldn't find him. i remembered that i had left him in my suitcase which i hadn't yet put away (messy trans girl moment) and resolved to clean up tomorrow (which was today) and get him and bring him back to the rest of my stuffed animals right next to my bed.
so today i go to my suitcase and he isn't there. no worries, i must have forgotten i had taken him out and he rolled down into a crack near my bed. around noon i start looking for him between doing my daily chores of helping my dad and so on, but every place i look for him that he's usually found, he's nowhere. at around 5 i get my dad in bed for his evening nap and i start looking in earnest, a little nervous. i think i called my brother about thirty minutes into looking under and around places where i would be surprised to find him, and he does a look over and says he isn't there.
two hours later and im in tears. im convinced that i accidentally let him fall into some box that i brought down to the trash room and i've lost him forever. he was one of my first gifts my mom got me after i came out to her three years ago, for christmas that year. he was cute, and while im not a furry, i cherish wooloo as an icon for the kind of joie de vivre and silly behavior that most aligns with my personality. i felt allowed, for the first time in a long time, to like that kind of thing openly with the people i love. what's more, one of the most painful components to my gender dysphoria is my inability to bear children. i want, more than most things on earth, to be a mother. it makes me terribly sad to realized how that isn't possible for me, even though i know one day i will adopt or surrogate a beautiful child of my own who i will love with every ounce of my being and, god willing, show him the kind of love my own mother showed to me. i project these feelings onto mutton. he is "my son," and while i know all there is to know about how he is not actually my son, the feeling, the thought of him "waving goodbye" and telling me he loved me as i accidentally sent him to be thrown into one of the waste-to-energy facilities for the city to be burnt for a minor amount of fuel had me (and even now thinking about it has me) in tears. i was a failure as a mother. even this small motherhood, pitiful as it was, was beyond me. i fought through the tears and bouts of sobbing, missing my baby, and continued my search, getting desperate enough to start to wade through my father's hoarding mass that lines my room, disassembling boxes, going down into the trash room to triple check that i hadn't accidently just throw him out, making a grand mess (though i did make a great deal of progress in breaking down my father's massive trash collection and throwing it away for which i am grateful).
finally my father and roommate had heard me crying and were eager to console me, giving me ideas for looking in places and helping. i was completely miserable when, around 9, i gave my brothers another call and in tears begged them to give the apartment another once over.
i nearly broke down when my little brother told me that he was hiding underneath sheets and covers i had folded the last day i was there as i was getting ready to leave. he was okay, and up until that point i had no idea how important mutton was to me. the wave of relief i felt knowing my son was okay frankly shocks me. i love this silly sheep stuffed animal so much. my little brother took a picture of my son, shown above. mutton is going to take an extended vacation with his uncles down south and when my little brother comes up to take care of me when i recover from vaginoplasty, either him or my mother will bring him up to reunite me. i cannot bear the incredibly minor chance my son might get lost in the mail if he is sent, so even if a month and a half of separation will be sucky, that's okay.
i think i need to talk about my sadness about my infertility with my therapist. at least, my boyfriend said i should talk about this later, and that sounded right to me. i have always dreamed of being a mother. i think one day i will be a mother, and i feel if i can let my actions be guided by the kind of love i feel for mutton right now, what i can only assume would be an even stronger love, then i believe i will be a decent mother. in the mean time, i will be very glad to be reunited with mutton in october. i love my son very much.
