The stuffed horse of the apocalypse

The horse's glassy eyes stared straight at me. Someone had pushed the three-foot tall, plushy relic of two early childhoods nose-to-nose with me as I slept.

"Butterscotch," we'd called her, and apparently she was now my charge.

I look around my home -- a mix of old and older, encapsulated in a structure that echoes a similar span of time -- and I see the field of damage caused by life's mostly harmless hurricanes.

When I step on the discarded carcasses littering the way forward, they squeak.

Or they squish.

Or they scrunch down into a soft, flat carpet of fabric I will refuse to launder on principal.

Such is the nature of motherhood.

Room to room, wall to wall, wherever I turn there are the many remnants of an ongoing if not an entirely adorable storm.

The flotsam and jetsam of experimentation.

I imagine it's not unlike the 23,000-and-counting pieces of aeronautical junk floating in space; Clouding the view of Hubble.

"How many hours does it take to bake an inch-wide brownie with a lightbulb?" my eldest asks.

The question didn't come from thin air.

Curled up with a blanket and viewing screen, and next to a growing pile of empty wrappers, she was watching reruns of  "Friends."

She had gotten to the part where Monica Geller admitted the temptation of uncooked batter was always too great to overcome the wait time on her EZ-Bake oven. 

And she thought it was funny but ultimately unbelievable: How could anyone enjoy the runny consistency of uncooked batter with raw eggs?

"Four hours seems right," said my daughter; no doubt talking to the screen though I was sitting right beside her. "I made a sad little cupcake in one of those toys once with my friend, Amy. I remember it took four hours to bake! I never understood why we couldn't just use the real oven."

There were so many reasons why.

Toys are fun.

And distracting.

And physical reminders of our position in society. They help you grow up and remind you you were once a child.

Not to mention the point that your poor mother didn't have to worry about industrial accidents or fingertip burns.

"I'm glad I never had one," she says, again to the empty space between us. "It seems like such a waste."

I can't help but be annoyed.

"Unlike the rock polisher? Or the plastic ceramics wheel? Or the science kit that got used exactly once each?"

She jumped as if she hadn't seen me sitting there in the same room at the end of her couch. As if I were a pillow propped against the furniture that speaks.

"It's not as if I asked for any of those things," she said with all of the truth and a single grain of salt.

These gifts - still taking up residence on shelves and in closets - all failures of excess: Pretty boxes to wrap and unwrap on special occasions. 

But there were successes.

There was the inflatable water slide (finally retired after umpteen years and numerous fabric patches) and that rideable pony, which was blank staring me right in the eye.

The stuffed horse of the apocalypse.