I regret to inform everyone that we have opened an animal rescue, and I would like it entered into the record that I did not approve this. There was no family meeting, no business plan, no nonprofit paperwork, and no zoning board. Nobody commissioned a feasibility study to find out whether our house could physically hold one more living creature. Lynnlee just started bringing home the needy, one at a time, like a tiny Mother Teresa with access to my debit card.

The good news is that every animal in this rescue is stuffed with polyester. The bad news is that there are roughly nine thousand of them.

Lynnlee has appointed herself founder, executive director, intake coordinator, foster parent, adoption specialist, and emotional-support liaison of the Lynnlee Home for Wayward Stuffies. The mission statement is simple: every stuffie needs love. The fine print, which nobody showed me before I signed, says every stuffie also needs to live at my house.

It always starts innocently. We’ll be walking through Target, Walmart, a gift shop, a gas station, a hospital lobby, or the clearance aisle of a store we walked into specifically to buy toothpaste. The location is irrelevant, because the outcome is always the same.

Lynnlee sees it. It’s never the prettiest stuffed animal, it’s rarely the softest, and it is certainly never the one I would pick. She goes straight for the one that looks like it has been through some shit. Maybe its ears are crooked, or one eye is buried under an unfortunate tuft of synthetic fur. Maybe it’s a yellow giraffe with a pink bow who looks like she’s been waiting seventeen years for somebody to come home from the war.

Then Lynnlee stops walking and says, “Oh, Mommy,” and my entire body goes cold, because I know that voice. I know exactly what happens next. She picks it up, stares deep into its dead little plastic eyes, and somewhere inside her seven-year-old soul, Sarah McLachlan starts singing.

“Mommy, nobody is going to love her.”

Ma’am, this is a Walmart. She was manufactured six months ago. She does not have abandonment trauma. She has a barcode.

But it’s already too late, because Lynnlee has bonded. Within about forty-five seconds, the animal has a name, a gender, a personality, a tragic backstory, and what I can only describe as attachment issues.

“Her name is Rosie.”

Of course it is.

“She doesn’t have a family.”

She has an ENTIRE BOX OF IDENTICAL SISTERS three feet away from you.

“But this one needs me.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how every hostage situation in my house begins.

Now, before anyone starts typing, “Jacqueline, you’re the parent, just say no,” I want you to know that I do say no, at least some of the time. There comes a point where even the most compassionate organization has to admit the facility has reached maximum capacity, and we passed that point about three Squishmallows ago.

We have stuffed-animal nets hanging from every corner of her bright pink bedroom. We have a stuffed-animal zoo. We have beanbags that are less “beanbag” and more “compressed mammal storage.” We have baskets, we have bins, we have animals sitting on the furniture, and we have animals living inside the furniture. There are plush creatures occupying beds that were purchased for actual human beings, and some nights I have to excavate my child from under fourteen pounds of polyester wildlife like a rescue dog after an avalanche.

“Move Rosie.”

“I CAN’T. SHE SLEEPS THERE.”

Fine, move Pinky.

“She’ll be sad.”

What about Sarah?

“Mommy! Sarah needs Pinky!”

Apparently there are alliances. There is an entire geopolitical structure operating in that bed, and nobody briefed me. Meanwhile, my actual biological child is sleeping diagonally on six inches of mattress because a stuffed llama has emotional needs, and I’m standing there wondering who exactly is running this rescue.

And yes, occasionally we make her leave one behind, because we are monsters. We are Disney-stepmother-level villains, and the tears that follow are not the fake little “I want a toy” tears. They are grief. She walks out of that store looking back over her shoulder like she’s being dragged off a battlefield and forced to abandon a wounded soldier.

“I’M SORRY!”

Lynnlee, it is a Squishmallow.

“IT NEEDED ME!”

Someone else will buy it.

“BUT WHAT IF THEY DON’T LOVE IT?!”

That is when Kris gives me The Look. You know the one. It says, very clearly, “Do not put that damn thing in the cart.” And I give him a look right back that says, “Sir, I have made several questionable financial decisions in my lifetime, and we are about to add a twelve-dollar stuffed axolotl to the list.”

Into the cart it goes. Kris rolls his eyes, Lynnlee hugs her newest dependent, and somewhere in a data center, Visa approves another emergency rescue operation.

Here’s the problem: I can’t even pretend I don’t understand her. I turn forty-two on October 18 (and for anyone wondering what size I wear, it’s Moscato d’Asti or Roscato Rosso Dolce), and I still sleep with a teddy bear named Brownie.

Brownie was given to me when I was very young, and he became the first thing I ever truly cherished. I don’t mean favorite-toy-this-month cherished. I mean mine. I slept with him, I traveled with him, and I cried into him. When I was sick, Brownie was there. When I was scared, Brownie was there. When life hurt, Brownie caught the tears and never once told me to calm down.

When I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast with one suitcase and a travel bag, there was no room for sentimental bullshit, and Brownie went in the travel bag anyway. There was no debate. Clothes can be replaced, but Brownie had a seat.

I slept with Brownie when I was single. I slept with Brownie when I got married. I slept with Brownie when I was pregnant. And when the bed filled up with children, the kids were told to scoot over, because Brownie has seniority.

That bear has been through more chapters of my life than almost any living person, and he is still in my bed, still catching tears when I need him to. At this point Brownie isn’t a stuffed animal. He’s tenured. He has benefits. He almost certainly has opinions about my marriage, and he’s smart enough to keep them to himself.

Of all my children, Lynnlee is the one who understood Brownie, and she understood him a little too well. There was a dark period in our family history when she decided Brownie belonged to her, and for roughly two years, I lost custody.

I would like the record to reflect that I handled this with maturity and grace. That is a lie. I wanted my bear back, and I wanted him back badly.

But she loved him the way I loved him. She protected him, slept with him, and treated him like he mattered. As much as I wanted to rip my childhood teddy bear out of a tiny child’s arms while screaming “HE WAS MINE FIRST,” there was something unbearably sweet about watching the one kid who seemed to understand exactly why he was special.

Eventually custody was restored, and Brownie returned to his rightful mother. There was no court hearing, because we settled privately. She got visitation.

So yes, I have a soft spot for the rescue center. Sue me.

Lynnlee doesn’t just collect stuffed animals. She remembers every damn one of them. Ask this child to put her bowl in the sink and you’d swear she’s never heard of a sink. Dirty clothes are a completely foreign concept.

“Pick up your underwear.”

“What underwear?”

THE UNDERWEAR YOU JUST STEPPED OVER.

But hold up a random yellow giraffe that’s been buried under 417 other stuffed animals and ask her where it came from, and suddenly she’s testifying under oath.

“Oh! I got her when we went to that place with Daddy and Harper, and I was wearing my pink shirt, and we ate chicken afterward, and it was raining, and you said I couldn’t have her at first but then you let me because she looked lonely.”

Excuse me? This child cannot remember an instruction I gave her eleven seconds ago, but she maintains a complete historical archive of stuffed-animal acquisition records. She knows their names, where they came from, who was with us, what the occasion was, and why that particular one mattered. The CIA should be this organized.

These aren’t toys to her. They’re little bookmarks in her childhood, and that’s the part that gets me.

Someday that bright pink room won’t have nets sagging under the weight of forty-seven stuffed animals. There won’t be a bed so crowded with Rosie and Pinky and Sarah and God knows who else that I have to negotiate sleeping arrangements with a plush committee. Someday she’ll decide she’s too old for most of them. Some will go into boxes and some will probably get donated, but a select few will survive every purge, because they are hers the way Brownie is mine.

And if she’s anything like her mother, one of those ridiculous creatures will still be tucked beside her when she’s forty-two, married, raising kids, paying bills, running a business, and pretending to be a functional adult. It might catch her tears. It might ride across the country in a travel bag. It might sit next to her through heartbreak, motherhood, sickness, loss, joy, and every strange version of herself she turns into along the way.

Maybe that’s why I keep putting the damn things in the cart. I don’t do it every time, because let’s not get crazy. The rescue is over capacity, the board of directors (Kris) is threatening budget cuts, and Animal Control is one beanbag inspection away from shutting us down.

But sometimes I look at Lynnlee clutching some pathetic, crooked little creature to her chest like she just pulled it out of a burning building, and Kris rolls his eyes, and I smile, and another one comes home.

Because Lynnlee is right. Every stuffie needs love. They just all apparently need to receive it at my fucking house.