This is the tale of a child’s missing toy cat … and I must warn you, it isn’t pretty

My attempt to ease my daughter’s inconsolable grief ended badly. Missing was a small cuddly toy, a brown kitten to be precise, and my then two-year-old daughter christened her “Pretty”.

I‘ve read about how the Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz invented the character Linus with his beloved comfort blanket because of his own daughter Jill who carried a blanket everywhere.

It was a small cuddly toy, a brown kitten to be precise, and my then two-year-old daughter christened her “Pretty”. It quickly became her favourite toy. Soon enough Pretty became an extra member of the family, going everywhere that my daughter did, from the bed to the dinner table to the dentist to the local park.

We lived in New York in those days, in a high-rise building, where a stuffed kitten was as close as we could get to a real cat until we returned back home to Australia.

My daughter’s older brother, then aged four, had a similar all-consuming attachment to a cuddly toy dog called Ba Ba, effectively turning the four of us humans into a six-member family.

The loss of a family member is never easy to deal with but this was to be Pretty’s fate.

On the weekends, I would take the kids to the city’s vast Central Park to escape our high rise and breathe fresh air. Kitty and Ba Ba routinely joined us. Knowing that the sky would fall if one of them were to be lost, I would always double-check, even triple-check, that I brought our cuddly pets back home with me.

Until one day I didn’t. I still don’t know to this day why Pretty never made the journey back from Central Park to 266 East 66th street on that fateful day. Did I somehow leave her in the park while I put my daughter in the stroller? Did Pretty fall off the stroller on the way home?

All I know is that the moment I realised Pretty was missing felt like the moment the world stood still. Any parent who has misplaced or lost their child’s favourite toy will know the feeling. It’s silly, over the top, can’t be rationalised, yada yada yada, but the bottom line is you can’t bear that your own stupidity will break your child’s heart.

And it did. She was beside herself when she realised her Pretty had vanished.

I pretended to her that Pretty would be home soon and I raced back to Central Park to try to retrace our steps. But searching for a small stuffed kitten in New York’s Central Park felt like looking for a specific grain of sand in the Sahara desert.

I read later about the crazy lengths parents will go to find a lost favourite toy of their child. I read of a parent who took a flight back to his holiday destination to search the beach and the hotel they stayed at. And of parents who put up “wanted” signs for the lost toys as people do with real missing dogs and cats. I even recalled myself once travelling clean across Manhattan to retrieve Ba Ba after the toy dog was left at my son’s friend’s apartment.

I later read about how the Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz invented the character Linus with his beloved comfort blanket because of his own daughter Jill who carried a blanket everywhere.

Three years before Linus’s security blanket made its first appearance in Peanuts in 1954, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott wrote a seminal paper on these so-called “transitional objects”. Winnicott explained why a child’s first favourite toy is so important to them- for comfort, for imagination, for security – and why they will usually remember that toy for life.

So having lost Pretty, I knew I had two choices. Keep living with a broken-hearted daughter or choose a little white lie to keep the peace. So I took the subway – which should have been dubbed the White Lie Line – to the toy store FAO Schwarz in search of another identical Pretty where, to my delight, I found her.

I bought the new impostor home but first I had to rough it around a bit to make it look like the original, slightly worn, Pretty. I hoped that none of our neighbours caught a glimpse of this grown man trying to beat up a stuffed ­kitten.

When I was happy that Pretty Mark II looked roughly like Pretty Mark I, I gave the softened-up kitten to the building’s doorman and asked him to go along with my reunion plan. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door of our apartment 16C. I opened the door and there was the doorman holding the new Pretty. If I could have bottled the look on my daughter’s face, I would have.

Tears of joy, elation, amazement. The doorman explained to her that Pretty – like all clever lost cats – had found her way back from Central Park all by herself. My daughter didn’t blink at the implausible scenario. All that ­mattered to her was that Pretty was back.

I wondered briefly about the ethics of my behaviour, but given the happy outcome, I didn’t lose sleep over it.

I felt even better later when I learned there was a blog called Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service which helps parents to buy the exact replica of their child’s lost toy.

The site is filled with desperate pleas from desperate parents – “looking for a Christmas miracle, please help me locate this toy”, says one post with a picture of a toy sloth. It seems I was not alone.

I was reminded of the tale of Lotso bear in Toy Story 3, where a girl called Daisy left her favourite toy Lotso in the park. When a distressed Lotso finally makes it back to the girl’s house, he sees that her parents have replaced him with another Lotso bear – a discovery which leaves Lotso heartbroken and pushes him into a life of crime.

I tried to put this all aside. Indeed I had all but forgotten the tale of Pretty, when seven years later, I was somehow reminded of it. We had returned to Australia to live and my daughter was now nine years old. For some reason, at that ­moment, I decided she was now old enough to hear the true story of Pretty.

I assumed that with the passage of time and maturity she would laugh about it and say “Dad, you trickster, thanks for doing that”. But as I was telling her the truth about Pretty’s Central Park demise, I saw her eyes widen. They stared at me first in shock. Then in horror. Then they filled with tears. She started to sob.

“So the new Pretty is an impostor?” she finally wailed.

Um, I guess so.

“And the real Pretty is still out there somewhere?”

Um, maybe.

“So Pretty is lost forever, Dad. Lost in New York – FOREVER!!!”

Ouch.

The tale of Pretty had turned ugly. It was way too early for me to be honest with her. I was a goose. I had exhumed Pretty for no good reason, triggering the very tears I had tried to stop all those years ago.

It was a big black day for my ­little white lie.