Real
Children’s stories keep teaching the same secret—that you are made real by being loved. They are not, finally, about the toys.
In the nursery there is an old toy called the Skin Horse, who has lived longer than any of the others and had his brown coat loved bald in patches and most of the hairs pulled out of his tail to string bead necklaces, and one day the new Velveteen Rabbit asks him what it means to be Real. The Skin Horse tells him. Real, he says, isn’t how you are made. It isn’t something built into you at the factory. It is a thing that happens to you—and it happens when a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but really loves you, and then, slowly, you become Real. The Rabbit asks if it hurts. Sometimes, says the Skin Horse, who is honest. And he tells the Rabbit the rest of it: that it doesn’t happen all at once, that it takes a long time, and that by the time you are Real most of your hair has usually been loved off, and your eyes have dropped out, and you have gone loose in the joints and very shabby. But none of that matters, he says, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
Margery Williams wrote that in 1922, and it is the purest version of a thing that runs through children’s stories like a hidden river, and once you notice it you cannot stop seeing it: the conviction that you do not start out real, and you are not made real, but that you are made real by being loved.
It is the secret of the fox in The Little Prince. The fox asks the boy to tame him, to come back at the same hour each day and sit a little closer, and explains that this is how a creature stops being one fox among a hundred thousand identical foxes and becomes, for one person, the only fox in the world. It is the time you have wasted on your rose, the fox says, that makes your rose matter—and then the harder line, the one that turns the whole book: that you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. To be loved into realness is also to be made irreplaceable, and to make someone responsible for you. It is the engine under Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wants past everything to become a real boy. It is, transparently, the whole anxious heart of Toy Story, where a toy is alive but its life means nothing except in being loved by its child, and the one true catastrophe, worse than the incinerator, is to be outgrown. The stories keep circling the same point and handing it to children in different wrappers: realness is conferred. It comes from outside. It comes from being loved, over time, and it costs something to receive.
This is not sentimental decoration, and it is not only a pretty idea. It is close to a developmental fact, and it is the thing Donald Winnicott spent a career describing, though he said it in colder, more careful words. The loved toy—the Rabbit, the bald Skin Horse, the blanket that cannot be left behind—is what he called the transitional object: the first not-me possession, the thing the child both finds and creates and genuinely cannot do without, living in the charged space between the child and the world. And here is the part the stories know and Winnicott proved: the realness the Rabbit receives from being loved is the very same realness the child is, at that exact moment, receiving from being loved. Winnicott thought the whole of psychic health came down to feeling real—and feeling real, he found, is not something a person generates from inside. It is given. It comes from being held, recognized, truly seen by someone who loves you, the way the Rabbit comes alive under the child’s hands. And its absence has a name too: the false self, the compliant unreal one, the self that feels futile and not-quite-alive, which is what grows in the place where that loving recognition failed to arrive. So the child loving the Rabbit into being and the child being loved into being are not two things. They are one event, mirrored across the nursery floor, running in both directions at once.
And the stories are honest about the cost in a way the adults reading them aloud have usually trained themselves to forget. Becoming Real wears you out. The Rabbit’s plush gets loved thin, the hair comes off, the eyes go, the seams loosen—to be Real is to be handled, used, marked, no longer pristine. This is not the regrettable side effect of the process. It is the process. The perfect toy, the one kept in the box, mint, untouched, on a high shelf—that toy stays beautiful and stays an object, forever, because no one has ever worn it down by needing it. The price of being made real is being used until you are shabby, and the stories tell children, gently and without flinching, that the shabbiness is not the loss. The shabbiness is the evidence. You cannot be Real and pristine both. Something has to get loved off you. That is an astonishing thing to tell a small child, and they take it in without blinking, because at some level they already know it is true.
Which is the last turn, and I think the real reason these stories grip children far harder than the grown-ups narrating them quite register. The child is not, in the end, worried about the Rabbit. The child is the Rabbit. A child is a small new creature in the middle of finding out whether it is real, and how realness is gotten, and what it costs—and the story keeps handing it the one answer it most needs and cannot yet put into words for itself: that you become real by being loved, and that you are being loved, and so you are becoming real. The story is a mirror held up to the child’s own deepest and least sayable question, and the answer that comes back, every time, in the shape of a rabbit, is yes. They are not really about the toys. They were never about the toys. The toy is the child, working out at one safe remove—in fur, where it can be borne—the only thing it truly needs to know.
The Skin Horse is telling the Rabbit the truth. But he is also, through the page, telling the child on the lap, and through the child, telling us, who have mostly forgotten it and could badly stand the reminder: that none of us was born real. That we were each made real by being loved, slowly, over a long, long time. That it cost us our shine and our newness and left us loose in the joints and worn thin in patches. And that this—exactly this, the particular shabbiness of having been loved for years—is the only kind of real there has ever been, and the only kind worth being.