I do not collect anything tangible, only the fleeting feelings and textures of motherhood, moments I turn over in my mind like a rock in my hand, smoothing them and looking for their meaning.
***
My oldest, Luke, has grown so much that we’ve hit the stage where people ask if he’s taller than me. Standing side by side, his eyeline matches mine. One day, we’re out in the front yard of our home in suburban Detroit and my neighbor, Meghan, mom of four boys younger than mine, lines us up to see. Luke moves close and tips his chin to the late afternoon sky, ready to overtake me, wanting to claim the title of tallest. And maybe he is taller. Meghan uses her hand to touch each of our heads, and the results are inconclusive.
Time has slipped away, day by day, bedtime by bedtime, birthday by birthday, and now we’re here, with my boy looking me eye to eye. Brown into brown.
***
I’m jealous of the moms posting photos with their daughters at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. She’s performing two nights in Detroit, and from my social media feeds it seems the entire metro region is on its way there. These girl moms have proverbial battle scars from acquiring the tickets; videos of elaborate Christmas or Hanukkah or birthday surprises when their daughters opened unassuming boxes, found Taylor tickets inside, and burst into tears. They have tales of hunting for the perfect concert outfit, for planning which era they’d represent. They will make memories that are not mine to have — posing outside Ford Field, collecting homemade friendship bracelets, and the ringing in their ears from 60,000 people screaming along to “All Too Well.”
As a mom of teen boys, I haven’t wished for a daughter in many years, but with each scroll through my phone while Taylor is in town, I feel that ache of wishing to be at this concert with a daughter.
Instead, my boys and I hunt for Pokémon. We walk the neighborhood streets with our phones, staring at the little animations on the screen, hoping they will spawn so we can throw imaginary balls to catch them. It’s absurd. I have almost 500 Pokémon. I am a level 30. That means I’m not new at this (but it’s not that impressive in the grand scheme of Pokémon levels). I had a Pokémon account for years before my boys had phones; back then, we’d walk tightly together down the sidewalk, the boys a tripping hazard, one on either side pulling to better see what Pokémon appeared on my screen. We’d take turns catching them, perfecting our finger flicks and curve balls.
Now we each have an account, and the boys delight in telling me things they think I don’t know about Pokémon, and I delight in saying idiotic things to make them laugh. They’re at the age where laughing at me is one of their favorite things. I say things like, “I just caught a Jigglypuff, but it’s called a Wigglytuff,” and the boys ridicule me because don’t I know that a Wigglytuff is just the evolved form of Jigglypuff?
I do, but I don’t admit it. We might not have Taylor, or an arm-full of traded friendship bracelets, but we have this.
***
I grow frustrated if I try to recollect moments from when the boys were little. It’s not that long ago, but my memory falters. I struggle to surface more than the faintest outline, the amorphous exterior of a scene. I can’t dip into their babyhood with fidelity. The finer details have scattered from my filing system.
What was Luke’s first bath like? Was it in the kitchen sink? Or was it the bathtub in our old bungalow, the tiny baby tub placed inside? Did he squeal? I can’t say for sure. He was only six pounds when he came home, but I don’t remember what that smallness felt like in my hands.
***
When I was growing up, my mom and her sisters, my aunts Sherry and Sandy, went through various collecting obsessions.
First, at my Aunt Sandy’s insistence, they collected blue-and-white Royal Copenhagen plates. The company (one of the oldest in the world, it claims) releases a new plate each Christmas, as well as on other holidays, like Mother’s Day. The plates, all the same shade of blue, carry images of places from around the world; landmarks my family, for the most part, has not visited. Sandy, the most traveled of the three sisters, the one without children, would purchase her older sisters these plates and present them at our Christmas gift exchange to lukewarm receptions. It seemed like the gifting and receiving of the blue plates was more an obligation than a joy. They spoke to Sandy’s taste — her worldliness, her independence — and reminded her sisters of their Danish heritage, something Sandy took the most pride in. Sandy is the sister who unearthed the full family tree through her research then traveled to Denmark to meet our long-lost relatives. My mother and Sherry, with five kids between them, with no real time or ability to travel, dutifully accepted these plates, which wouldn’t be used for anything more than decor, and displayed them in glass curio cabinets in their living rooms.
Still, seeing this ritual of exchange between the three sisters each Christmas — it made me ache. I wished for a sister to give me something to collect, even if that something was a Danish plate I barely tolerated.
***
When I found out I was having my first son, and that he was not a daughter, tears were shed. This was the same day I discovered this son likely had something wrong with his heart. Were the tears for his imperfect heart or my desire for a daughter? They were a strange mix of both. But that sadness didn’t last long. I started to picture a boy in my arms. I planned his nursery. His room was at the end of the short downstairs hallway in our first house. He had two windows. My father-in-law painted the walls pale green. It took him longer than I expected, but he was a careful painter, taping off all the trim, making slow brush strokes. We laid the room with a beige, shaggy area rug, the price of which knocked me out. When we moved four years later, we lugged it with us. The rug was dingy from years of babies rolling around on it, of little footpads pounding across it. We used things until they were destroyed, so into the new house it went, not to be replaced for years.
***
After the Danish plates followed a long basket phase during which my mom and her sisters became enamored with Longaberger baskets, which they bought for one another to do… what, I couldn’t say. A basket is theoretically a useful item, but their basket phase was less about function than it was about being able to say they had an extensive basket collection.
The company’s website, active still, throws around the word “heirloom” like candy. It has for sale, among other things, a Collector’s Thanksgiving Cornucopia Basket with Protector in “warm cinnamon,” priced at $276. Maybe heirloom is right. These baskets still appear at family gatherings, holding napkins or silverware. I have one handed down by Aunt Sandy, who is at the stage of life where she’s thinning out her collections. For her, it’s time to pass things down, to give away her treasures but keep them in the family still, a link from one generation to the next through interwoven maple wood. (Aunt Sherry’s baskets were inherited by her kids when she died of cancer a decade ago.)
My Longaberger sits high on a shelf and holds crayons, which my boys are now too old to care about.
***
Today, the pale green nursery is a foggy memory. Luke sits his gangly body in a black gaming chair — a god-awful, giant, ugly monstrosity of a chair, the kind made famous by gamers with online handles like Mr. Beast and CutiePie. He wears a headset and yells into it at his friend who sits in a similar chair in the next town over. He’ll stay in the chair most of the evening. He might emerge at some point for food or a drink, or to bounce on the trampoline with his brother. He will rarely go out like I did when I was his age. I take solace in the fact that the video game is social, he is at least playing with his friend a few miles away. But it strikes me as a lonely teenage experience, not what I pictured when he was that baby in the meticulously painted nursery. If I’m honest, I’m not the parent who charted my kids’ paths. I don’t have a master plan for what their futures are supposed to be.
Isn’t the future a slippery thing? Who am I to think I can orchestrate what will be?
***
Luke and J.J., my younger son, convince me to go on a Pokémon raid the day of the Swift concert. A raid is a battle that occurs at a specific time and place. It is never, to my dismay, in the living room. It’s somewhere public, where you have to stand, uninhibited, throwing your pretend balls at pretend creatures on your phone, and someone you know might see you. The raid this evening is at a nearby house that is historic for ambiguous reasons; it might be the oldest house in our neighborhood. It has a sign that explains it is the Fred Baker house, and this Colonial Revival house is a Pokémon “Gym,” where raids happen. We drive there in the drizzle. As we drive, Luke explains his new strategy involving a third-party app that lets him alert Pokémon players worldwide to join our raid remotely. This is a big deal because, without a small army of people, the Pokémon are usually too powerful for us to defeat. We alert the masses of our raid at the Fred Baker house and join a long queue of other Pokémon raiders as we wait for help from across the globe.
I did not foresee this moment when they were babies in the green nursery; I didn’t anticipate us sitting outside a stranger’s house, waiting for reinforcements to help us defeat a digital Japanese monster. They say parenting is full of surprises. Maybe this is what they mean. You can want daughters, but delight in sons. You dream of pop concerts, but enjoy video games just as much.
***
When I was pregnant the first time, as we worried about what would happen when he was born — would he have to have heart surgery? — we registered at a big box baby store, one that’s now out of business. My prevailing memory about this trip is colored in confusion. What did we need? What was just good marketing? What gear would make us good parents? What would help our baby, in particular, be whole? We wandered down what felt like endless aisles, a chunky black scanner in my hand. I wished the store offered a registry consultant. Someone who understood we wouldn’t know what to add to our list. Someone who could tell us what kind of parents to be. Someone who could say, hey, your baby will be fine, with or without the crib bumper.
I can’t think of anything we were gifted at our shower that I would tell a new mom today she must grab. Everything changes, even the tools of parenting. Today’s moms with their sleek strollers, all black angles, like little feats of German engineering, don’t need my advice or to hear my memories. Maybe they’d want to know that none if it mattered, not really. So scan away. Those items won’t be what you remember in 17 years.
***
Perhaps the most extensive collection of my parent’s generation (and the one initiated by my father) were their Dickens’ Villages. The dainty ceramic houses hit the market in 1994 — made by a company called Department 56 that is also still around — and were designed to evoke a quaint Dickensian holiday village. The sets included small people to populate the village, little fir trees to set the mood, and horse-drawn sleighs with villagers inside to line the imagined streets. The Villages at our house and my aunts’ homes delighted us for years; putting them up marked the return of the holiday season.
When I was a kid, I pictured bringing some of the houses — Tiny Tim’s house or the apothecary, probably — to wherever I’d live as a grown up. But now that I’m here, I don’t want them. They are too bulky. Where would I store all the boxes? How would I display it all? And besides, it is all so kitschy; too old-fashioned, too evocative of the Boomer generation’s aesthetic to make sense in a Gen X or Millennial home.
When we go to my parents’ house and the Village is up, I do hope my boys see it and smile. It’s not mine to display but it is whimsical to see, once a year, sparkling on the shelf.
***
It’s close to the time Taylor will take the stage less than 20 miles away. The moms there are probably adjusting their cowboy hats or holding their daughters’ sequined bomber jackets because they’re too hot. They’re screaming together. They’re dancing.
Outside the Fred Baker house, the evening is quiet. Rain pitters down on us. The boys pick on one another in good spirits while we wait.
Finally, a few helpers join the Pokémon raid. We enter the virtual gym — me, my boys, and three online friends. We each select a fighting team of six of our best Pokémon. We’re battling a giant jellyfish named Nihilego. He darts around the virtual dojo, and all of us, the attackers, circle him. Trying to capture a Pokémon in a raid involves furiously tapping your phone screen and swiping your virtual attacker out of the way of counterattacks. The opponents are so strong that your cadets die, one after the other, until all six are dead, and you must bring in another party of six new Pokémon to sacrifice. We tap away, and so do the new friends we’ve made; sure enough, it works. Nihilego’s energy wanes. A few minutes more, and the giant jellyfish is defeated. We scream in delight and go about catching him. Even once defeated, you still have to throw the pretend ball and “catch” the Pokémon. This is the knowledge I’ve collected.
We cackle and show off our phones, our catch dangling like a fish on a hook in the sun. I didn’t know what it would be like as a boy mom. I didn’t foresee how much I would enjoy something like this. I like playing with them. I like the inanity of catching virtual animals. Inane feels good. Being on their team feels good. It’s not the concert of the decade; it’s our car in the rain, and it’s lovely, for we too have formed community around a thing we love. Together, we are victorious. We were there, and the Pokémon was rare. I look at my smiling boys and feel all too well.
***
The last thing my mother collected, my favorite, were the Muffy Bears. Muffy VanderBears, to be precise. The name, modeled on those of prestigious East Coast families, says, “this bear comes from old money.” She’s been to a few clam bakes and polo matches. She uses “summer” as a verb and has multiple beachside cottages for her summering.
Muffy Bears are approximately eight inches tall and come in a variety of outfits. There’s one for every occasion: Halloween, Fourth of July, Christmas, Easter. There’s a Queen of Hearts Muffy with a crown, a ballet Muffy wearing a leotard and tutu, and a safari Muffy with a wide-brimmed hat, khakis, and a camera strapped to her furry wrist. Each Muffy comes with a wire stand that supports her, allowing collectors to display them side by side on shelves or bookcases. I used to tag along with my mom on her trips to the Muffy Bear showroom. It was in Flint, Michigan, on a commercial road lined with big box stores, strip malls, and the largest enclosed mall in the area, Genesee Valley. I can find no trace of the store online, but the bears litter several secondary market sites. I enjoyed visiting the Muffy store to explore the new varieties of Muffy, and I tried to understand why they delighted my mother so much.
I suspect it was a few things. Muffy was damned cute. And my Aunt Sherry, her best friend, also collected them. Sherry was her doorway to many things.
Among the plates, baskets, villages, and more, the Muffy Bears stand out as my mother’s defining collection. Perhaps I just liked them the most. How playful, toy-like, Muffy was. A contrast to my mom.
My mother, Kathy, spent her career as an elementary teacher then stayed home for years to raise her family before returning as a paraprofessional, a specialized and lower paid schoolteacher (a fact she brought up often) who taught kids to read. I perceived my mom as being resigned to her life rather than an active architect of it. She attended mass. She fretted about me and my brothers. She argued with my dad. She struggled with her own mother, whose depression and expectations weighed on her until my grandmother died in 1993.
She cut loose by playing Euchre or Pinochle with my dad and their friends, and sometimes she laughed so hard with her sisters that she nearly peed her pants.
But I didn’t see her as someone who made expansive room in her life for passions.
But then there was Muffy, unobjectionably fanciful, albeit in the most stuffy and white-bred way possible. Muffy told the world — and me — a different, softer story. Would a sad woman collect such happy little bears?
***
What do I collect? Do short-term plans count? I collect the kind of plans that keep day-to-day life running smoothly. I set up accounts. I organize passwords in a digital keeper. I sign the boys up for activities that set our schedule in motion. In paying the entry fees for marching band and soccer and swim team, I steal time from future me who could be writing or reading or walking or cooking or seeing friends. I hand hours over to the boys, to my role as a mother who will sit in the stands and cheer, drive to practices, cajole them to gather their stuff and get in the car — stuff I have gone to the store to buy, that I will organize and clean — then collapse at the end of the day from the effort of it all. I’m the architect, but what I’m building is less about my life than it is about theirs. I tell my future self this trade-off is good, that helping my boys collect these experiences will be worth it.
Is there a moment when you can know this for sure? When the residuals of these decisions, the outcomes of our collective choices are weighed, their value made clear?
I can say now that I’m tired, but I’m happy.
In this moment, I can say it feels worth it.
***
Luke has made it to senior year. There’s no question he’s taller now. Discussions of colleges, majors, SAT scores, and potential futures have become de rigueur. A pile of glossy ads from colleges around the country collects on the dining room table. We spend a rainy October afternoon in a photo studio, snapping senior portraits. He wears a variety jacket, where stitched on the back are the collection of activities he’s amassed: swimming and marching band.
J.J., meanwhile, has started collecting something new: cheap album cover posters, which he hangs in his room side-by-side. He’s trying to land the plane of his personhood in these early high school days, and musical taste is a big part of it. I get my wish of going to a concert with my kid. It’s not Taylor. Instead, he begs me to take him, on a school night, to a show at Detroit’s Masonic Temple. The artist D4vd is playing. I have never heard of this person. (Soon, I’ll know more than I want, when the rest of the tour is canceled because the body of a missing young woman is discovered in his car.) We go and J.J. sits on the floor, I sit in the balcony with the other moms, where we take in the throngs of screaming teens who go especially mad when the singer starts throwing Labubus into the crowd. Labubus are ugly, viral monster dolls, gremlins really, that sometimes go for hundreds of dollars in online “blind box” sales. They are so coveted they are cut and stolen off of people’s bags. I do not get Labubus. They are so popular, while being so not cute. Perhaps they’re so ugly, they are cute. Perhaps it’s a TikTok thing. The kids at the D4vd concert get it; they clamor to catch them as they sail into the crowd.
A mom at a neighborhood gathering recently told the story of hunting down a Labubu for her daughter. It was impossible until she was tipped off from another mom to her Labubu “dealer,” with whom she arranged, over text, a porch pickup. The process sounded not much different from how I assume drug deals happen.
Maybe her kid would like a Muffy Bear instead. At least Muffy is cute and furry. But probably not. One generation’s treasure is another generation’s trash.
***
My mother is nearing 80. She collects doctor’s appointments, prescriptions and the numerous complications of a faulty heart and diabetes. I wonder if I could find her a new Muffy, to surprise and delight her. I search online. The manufacturer, North American Bear Company, is still active, although its website hasn’t been updated since the 1990s, featuring a Pepto Bismol pink background and blinking graphics. It now manufactures, among other things, bears that resemble Muffy but are marketed as Downton Abbey Bears. However, Muffy herself is no longer available. She’s off on the beach somewhere in Nantucket, drinking an Arnold Palmer, wearing a gingham plaid linen separate and a woven visor to keep the sun off her furry face.
Some collectors do sell their prized Muffys on Etsy, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace. There are Dickens Villages, Longaberger baskets and blue plates there, too. I debate ordering one. Ultimately, I don’t. Mom’s collecting days are behind her, after all. So behind her that on my most recent visit, she toured me cabinet by cabinet through her items, imploring me to take whatever I liked. I left the Muffy there, but brought home a blue plate, the one from Mother’s Day the year I was born. It’s now on display, in my own glass cabinet, next to the cookbooks.
***
One recent evening, the doorbell rings, and it’s Meghan’s two middle boys. They want to know if my boys want to trade Pokémon cards. My boys still have their cards and enjoy trading them. I invite Meghan’s boys in. The younger of the two, George, says he can’t come inside because he had surgery the day before.
Curiosity gets the best of me, and I ask, What was the surgery for?
To get a port, he says.
And why did you need a port, I ask?
So I don’t have to keep getting IVs, he says. He is 6.
And why do you need IVs, I say, my mind going somewhere dark.
For medicine, he says.
I join them outside and see Meghan approaching. Once we set the boys on their way, their Pokémon card binders in hand, I tell her about the conversation and ask what’s happening.
What’s going on is cancer. Lymphoma. We hug in my driveway and, unhelpfully, I start crying, a big sob escaping before I can suck it back in. Meghan holds steady, but her eyes, her smile, they’re different from what I’ve always seen from her. She tells me the story of the worst day of her life, the day she couldn’t breathe, the day images of George dying came to her and roosted. There’s no explanation. There rarely is for cancer, and certainly not when the cancer patient is 6. She’s just learned it is Stage 2, and this is a relief. It means it is treatable and beatable. But a long summer of chemo awaits.
I want to buy George all the Pokémon in the world, the best, rarest, most special cards. Let his collection grow with his days, and let there be many.
I see my boys on her porch, strong and healthy. Hers are there, too, smaller, and seemingly well, but with sickness and hard days lurking. Their heads are all bowed in reverence for the cards they examine and share and collect. The evening is long, a cool summer day in June, and we two moms stand there, and I believe for just a moment that I know what will be. They’ll all grow bigger and go on to thrive. I want to think I can bottle this moment like any other, keep it with the others I’ve collected, and in doing so ensure our boys stay right where they are, the future a bright shining thing ahead of them.
But some things are uncollectable. I watch the moment pass. Here, then gone. These boys too will soon be gone from this porch, from their rooms, from their current obsessions and onto whatever will come next. I can only hope it will be beautiful, too.
Turn the rock, smooth it round, and let it fall from your hand.
Image by Lee Milo on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- What We Collect - April 21, 2026
Krista,
Thank you for this lovely, touching piece. There is so much to appreciate here about what we carry as family, as parents, as people.
I kept waiting for the Dickens Village to make an appearance.