Mothering young children is about making inanimate objects come alive. Waving them. Rattling them. Wiggling them. Making them sing or sob, giggle or dance. Giving them names and voices. Supplying dialogue. A heart and a brain.

When Quintana was a toddler, she’d do everything within her power to get me to play with her. She’d beg, negotiate, and cross-examine me into submission until I’d found myself on the floor in the bedroom holding a small plastic toy or stuffy and giving it an entire personality.

According to American puppeteer and director Roman Paska “any object to which people attribute life and energy” can be a puppet.

On the bedroom floor, Quintana and I infused inanimate objects with make-believe cortisol. We instilled rule-abiding amygdalas. We narrated elaborate backstories. But I soon realized our “play” was not an interactive experience. I had strings in my back that my daughter yanked at her whim—I was the puppet of her imagination and she was the puppeteer. The theatre of us laid out on a stage of her making. The script entirely in her head.

Quintana would feed me lines. I was supposed to memorize the dialogue quickly and then recite it back. Inevitably I’d screw up due to my own lukewarm investment in the performance, my mind wandering away and into an endless to-do list—what groceries we needed, what section of the apartment was due to be cleaned, what errands had to happen that day, and when the next doctor or dentist or eye appointment was scheduled. I would flub a line or a scene, and Quintana would fly into a rage.

“MOM, the dog is going to SCHOOL, not the STORE!”

We never achieved Quintana’s end goal, though I don’t know if she had an ending in mind. The game was conversation, expression, and dialogue—we never seemed to move through the plot in a linear way that prompted a climax. We wouldn’t even make it to the rising action.

Quintana saw through my lacklustre attempts. She could tell I hated playing with her. She could sense my boredom. She would put toys and stuffies in my limp hands and direct me, but I had no enthusiasm. I’d rather scour my oven or have my teeth cleaned. I’d rather hide in the bathroom, pretending to have bowel issues, texting desperate messages to friends who were new parents like me. I felt the obligation to perform motherhood, not so much for my children, or even my friends and family, but for the social contract I unknowingly entered into when I became a parent. Social media didn’t help, with its condescending memes written in self-righteous cursive—the days are long, but the years are short, being a mother is the most important job in the world—cheap shots unleashed at parents who just wanted to zone out for five minutes.

As my daughter deepened her love of stuffies, dolls, and all things make-believe, I joked to my husband that perhaps I’d just tell Quintana that I had pupaphobia, a fear of puppets, and that’s what prevented me from being able to play with her. “She’ll make you play anyway,” he said, and he was right. She wasn’t the type of toddler to care about my fears, real or pretend.

The way she relied so heavily on her stuffies and Paw Patrol characters did make me nervous. She seemed content only when directing the play and controlling the responses of her inanimate playmates. How would she respond to the friends she’d have in the future, humans who couldn’t be controlled? If the way she reacted to my inability to play her games was any indication, I imagined her future social life would be sparse and lonely.

One of Quintana’s most prized stuffies was a small green bear with a red-and-white-striped scarf, aptly named Green Bear. He was so tiny that he fit perfectly in her closed fist, and she took him everywhere. My friend Taran made a beautiful purple tweed jacket for Quintana and included a pocket specifically for transporting him. Green Bear was a crucial fixture in our family until, eventually, as many kids’ prized possessions do, he went missing.

At first, we assumed he’d ended up deep in the crevices of the couch, or wedged under her mattress, and as we looked, we explained that he was “around here somewhere.” Quintana seemed satisfied at first, but after weeks of being unable to find him, she funnelled her rising panic into her second-favourite stuffy, a small black-and-white dog she called Chocolate Drop, whom she would drag everywhere, giving him occasional baths in the sink when his fur got too grimy. After a few months, it seemed she’d forgotten all about Green Bear. But every so often I’d find her on the floor in her room, surrounded by a sea of stuffies. “I was looking for Green Bear,” she’d say...

As Quintana puppeteered, I became increasingly anxious. I could see how much she loved the power she held over her stuffies, and over the adults in her life. She’d throw me into her imagination, multiplying me into many selves. As I continued along my mothering trajectory, I felt simultaneously alive and deadened. I became afraid for myself. And then, of myself. I could feel myself shrinking, fragmenting. Disappearing...

Since puppets are not truly alive, they can be used to work out inner conflicts, as my daughter’s toys and figures did. Sometimes objects are safer. The inanimate connections we make are not alive, but neither can they leave us through death or abandonment.

When Quintana lost Green Bear, we assumed he was somewhere in the apartment we lived in. By the time we realized he was truly gone, Quintana had outgrown him in some ways, but she still spoke of him like he was a long-lost friend whom she hoped to reunite with. Even when lost, his legacy was such that she knew he was out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

Quintana is now almost ten, but sometimes out of nowhere she will sigh and then, almost in tears, will whisper under her breath, “I miss Green Bear.”

Excerpted from Monsters, Martyrs and Marionettes, by Adrienne Gruber. ©2024 Published by Book Hug Press.

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Learn more about Monsters, Martyrs and Marionettes:

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.

Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.

Ultimately, these deeply moving, graceful essays force us to consider how close we are to death, even in the most average of moments, and how beauty is a necessary celebration amidst the chaos of being alive.