Rudolf and Bubbing
Rudolf was a reindeer, famous for being the 9th and youngest reindeer, and for using his luminous nose to guide Santa’s sleigh. Mocked and disrespected by his fellow reindeer for this lucent beezer Rudolf none the less stepped up when Santa asked him to light the way one overcast Christmas Eve. His success finally earned him the acceptance of his peers. I loved the story of Rudolf for his spirited character. My own Rudolph was a mid-sized plush reindeer, worn from love and washing, with a red fabric nose. I took him everywhere, slept with him warm beside me, told him secrets, and in old Kodak photos of that time he is rarely absent. Once my mother washed him and I cried for hours at his altered appearance and the fear that he was no longer himself. However I soon took him back and loved him all the more.
Babies often have a favorite possession that they cherish when they are becoming aware that they are separate from their mother, what Donald Winnicott termed the
“transitional object:” the space between “me” and “not me.” The mother adapts to her infant in such an intimate fashion that he sees the breast as a part of himself rather than a part of his mother, and thus under his control. Winnicott felt this idea was a foreshadowing of the transitional object. The name the child gives the object is thought to be very important as often the name is a word used by the adults or may be partially a part of it. Whether or not this was true in my case is unknown to me. I don’t remember Rudolf as a household word, nor Ru or Dolf, though WW2 had ended not too long before this time, and it’s possible my father had used it in a rant against Germany.
I thought of Rudolf’s face as innocent, young, and empathic. His gaze was piercing. I dreamt I could fly and he flew with me.
I always felt scared and didn’t know why and felt I had to be vigilant or something abrupt and bad could happen at any time. I needed to be alert. Rudolf brought me back to myself; he loved me. He wasn’t me, but he wasn’t not me either.
One day he was taken away. “They” told me I was too old to be carrying around a reindeer. I was four. I felt first shock, then as if I’d been ripped apart, as if part of me was gone. I already felt alone, this sealed the deal. There was no one I could trust.
My mother never said I was a good baby though she never told me I was a bad baby either. She did tell me that she stopped breastfeeding me very early in infancy because I gnawed her with my teeth. To my knowledge babies that young don’t have teeth yet but the act of suckling can cause that sensation to the mother.
Not long after Rudolf vanished, I took up “bubbing”. This behavior consisted of putting my thumb encircled by my middle and index fingers behind the velvety binding of my little blue blanket, and rubbing this softly up and down over the front part of my nose. I think this was an effort to allay the formidable anxiety which I had internalized at that time and it did indeed pacify me untiI I was calm and content.
I could sit for hours and bub, in a corner, a chair, or in my bed. The world sort of disappeared, I was in a safe place, an alternate reality: no one could get to me. This captivating activity allayed for a time the frustration, anxiety, and anger I bore because my only friend Rudolf had been taken from my life without remorse or much of an explanation.
After a year or so, bubbing was also forbidden, the explanation being that it could give me cancer. I think my parents thought the behavior abnormal, and they, especially my mother, felt excluded by it. They thought me odd, and I frightened them. My parents’ personalities and stations in life did not easily accommodate the sensibilities of a shy, introverted child.
This was the way life was for me. An only child, I was alone. Misunderstood by my older parents, I keenly felt the loss of Rudolf and bubbing. They were the two things that grounded me and gave me some idea of peace. Thankfully they were both to be reified in relationships, objects, art, and meditation as an adult.