Childhood is a rough and maddening time. You’re always functioning at the very limit of your experience and competence. The information you hotly need is ambiguous and out of reach. Punishing consequences whirl in from every direction. You have awareness, but no control. …. It’s a cliché that society destroys the innocence and spontaneity of childhood, but before that, on a more basic level, it’s gravity that starts crushing your spirit. When you’re a toddler, it’s your best pleasure and accomplishment to successfully climb rio hy-yup on various things, and you just can’t believe it’s happening again when, for instance, you’re standing on your booster seat and leaning on the window sill to get a better look at a cool red bird and the goddamn seat slides back and you flip over for a clattering header because with your big hapa head you’re basically built like a shuttlecock.
It’s best if you can be a good sport about it.
Sweet Potato’s a pretty good sport, but it’s exasperating for her, too, and she’s got to be able get back in the pocket where she can take a breather from collecting the day’s allotment of contusions and tears. For Sweet Potato, all real comfort and security still emanates from Beeb the Mom, of course. And I count, too. But, hour to hour, the most important person is Lovey.

Lovey helps Sweet Potato be a good sport.
Lovey helps Sweet Potato dust herself off after taking a couple more lumps in her gravitational field testing. Sweet Potato now even prefers Lovey’s kisses to her Polar Bear cold pack for Big Donks.
Lovey’s an agreeable audience. These days Sweet Potato will spend up to an hour at naptime recounting her best stories and thoughts to Lovey, often sitting up a bit to read some books aloud or sing some favorite songs.
Lovey’s role as sidekick/cheerleader/consigliere is growing quickly, too. Sweet Potato has been interested in practicing conversational skills lately, and “make lovey tok” is her newest exercise, in which only she and Lovey talk (“NO deddhi! only lovey!”). Lovey’s a fickle stool pigeon, though, and she’s just as likely to try and make a pitch for a diaper change, or sing the clean-up song, as to do her Aishwarya Rai schtick or suggest a popsicle.
Old Potato’s a two-year old Odysseus, and Lovey is her Penelope. I hope she always has a Lovey to help her be brave and soak up some of her tears.
Everyone needs a lovey. When my sister was a kid she had a scrawny, sarcastic pal named Jenny. One night they had a sleepover at our house, and Jenny brought her lovey, named Weenie. Jennie and Weenie were about the same age, which was probably ten or eleven, and during their time together Weenie had gotten loved and kneaded into a brownish-grey sock of oily cloth that smelled strongly of old drool. I think Weenie might have had one eye or button still hanging on, but if you were going to market it as a toy you might have decided it would be one of the worms they rode in Dune. I was in high school, and made fun of Weenie that night (especially the smell), but Jenny was pretty cool about it. She grabbed Weenie back, shrugged it off, and said something to the effect of, whatever, dude, you are whoever you are, and that’s my Weenie, and went off. Years later Jenny moved to New York, where I lived, and we met for dinner. I remembered her mainly in regard to Weenie, so I had to ask about it. Weenie had been finely reupholstered (in red, as I recall), and was still the man, as it were, in Jenny’s world.
I had loveys, too, but my mom threw them away when I was in the first grade. My loveys were Rabbit and Bear. Rabbit was a golden polyester hand puppet, and Bear was a proto-Paddington sewn with a blue and white striped shirt and nightcap. Rabbit’s neck hole, where your finger went, was scratchy. Bear was a little smelly (but in a good way), and had a kind of grey shoddy stuffing that was always crumbling out. Rabbit was good with ideas and had a lot to say; Bear tended to communicate in a more pillow-like manner. One day I went home after another fucked-up first-grade day, and felt like we unwinding a bit with my pals Rabbit and Bear. Hey Mom, I asked, where are Rabbit and Bear? Oh you’re getting too old for them, she said, so I threw them away. She said recently that she thought I was talking to them too much. Talking to them too much? What did she think, we were plotting a coup?
Now I hear Jenny is a kingmaker who rules her industry by raising an eyebrow or clicking her thumb, and I’m still fumbling around and around unable to escape this oubliette of wives, and drink, and chess, and the ukulele.