The way it happened is this:

My four kids decided to play “city” one afternoon last spring. They started with sidewalk chalk and drew various buildings around the driveway. Each kid had his or her own house, plus there was a veterinarian’s office, a park, and a daycare for all the animals and dolls they had hauled outside from their bedrooms.

I didn’t pay much attention to the details of the game because when all four of our kids are playing happily and creatively together, I mostly try to stay out of the way.

Sometime in the middle of the game, I had to take my daughter, Norah, to soccer practice. When we returned home an hour later, the city was cleaned up and the kids were inside ready to eat dinner. A few days later, Norah asked me if I knew where Sarah was.

Sarah is Norah’s most beloved baby doll—the kind of baby doll you can hardly call a toy. She has a high chair and a bed and a pacifier that somehow, after eight years in our home, is still miraculously attached to a string on her purple romper. Only one of her blue eyes closes consistently, and she has black scuff marks all over her face and head. She is the rattiest doll you could ever lay eyes on, and everyone in our home calls her by her first name.

When Norah first asked me if I knew where Sarah was, I didn’t think much of it. She goes missing from time to time, usually tucked tightly into a makeshift bed of some sort wherever the kids were last playing house. When she mentioned her again a few days later, I asked Norah where she last remembered playing with her.

She reminded me of their game of city and how she had to leave early for practice. Her brothers thought they threw her in the tub with the rest of the stuffed animals at daycare, but she wasn’t there. We scoured the garage—cleaned it out completely. I sent the kids in the basement and emptied every tub of toys I could find. Sarah wasn’t anywhere.

Somewhere in the middle of all the looking, I remembered that sometimes the kids use cardboard boxes for pretend beds. I imagined Sarah being neatly placed into a box and then carelessly thrown into the garbage. Four months later, this is still my most plausible explanation.

I look for Sarah every single time I walk into the garage. I scan the shelves and the ground, convinced she might just suddenly be there, accidentally overlooked somehow. A few weeks ago, I was thrift shopping when I came across a bin full of baby dolls. I looked carefully at all the dolls on the top of the pile, legitimately believing I might find Sarah miraculously inside. Most recently, I passed two baby dolls on the shoulder of the interstate, and I almost pulled over to see if one of them might be her. That’s right: I almost stopped my car on the side of the highway for a baby doll sighting. This is where I’m at.

My husband, Jake, likes to tell the kids about the time his mom lost her checkbook in their family’s old conversion van. She sent him out to look for it, and he scoured the van—pulling up all the mats and looking beneath all the seats. Eventually, he took a break and said a quick prayer that the checkbook would turn up. Then, he looked under the driver’s seat—where he knew he had already looked—and there was the checkbook, plain as day.

We have prayed about Sarah—of course we have—and I have assured Norah that because God cares about her, he cares about Sarah. I believe this is true, but I know something else too: The world is full of broken things, and God doesn’t always answer our prayers exactly as we want him to.

I desperately want our kids to understand this dichotomy. I don’t want the reality of sad things to shake their faith in the goodness of God.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, when everything was still unnerving and uncertain, Jake, an ER doctor, made the decision to quarantine away from us—just until the peak hospitalizations started to fall. On the first night without him, I cut a heart out of a piece of red construction paper, and then the kids and I went around the table and each listed one thing we were thankful for. I taped the heart to the wall and we repeated the ritual every night. When Jake came home, there were forty three hearts taped in a rainbow on the wall.

We missed Jake’s closeness every one of those days, and we looked for examples of God’s kindness the same amount. Neither thing canceled the other out. We held all the feelings all the time, and I was keenly aware through it all that, though it would be the first truly difficult thing they would have to navigate in their lives, it wouldn’t be the last. I know they will each learn to taste fear and longing and grief in new ways, as we all do. So, I tried to see those weeks as an opportunity to teach them that they can believe in a good God and a broken world at the same time.

So it is with baby Sarah.

I know she is a doll. I know far sadder situations can and will happen to our family. I also know that even the smallest of things can help tether our kids to hope.

Norah will turn nine this fall, and she has already asked for one present: a photo album of pictures of her with Sarah. I plan to do her one better and put together a slideshow of videos as well.

The earliest video I can find is from 2016—just before Norah turned two. She holds Sarah on the couch and makes her tiny hand wave. “Ee ya!” she says on repeat because she loved Sarah before she could even say an “S” sound. I can remember when she would wrap Sarah in swaddle blankets and whisper to me, “Shhh. My baby ‘leepin’.” I tried to buy her a shiny new doll around that same time. She named the new one Dopey, and then refused to play with her. Sarah was always the one.

When Norah turned five, we bought her a baby carrier so she could wear Sarah on her chest. When she turned seven, Jake refinished a wooden rocking crib and a small high chair. Sarah ate meals with our family and slept soundly in a pair of pineapple pajamas I bought her. Last December, I figured we should have some quality portraits taken of Sarah, so I held her in front of one of our white walls and snapped a few pictures with my phone. When I look at those pictures today, I wish I could remember how bright her purple romper used to be. I wonder how many times I took a toothpick to her open mouth to dislodge something she had been fed. I consider where exactly I should hang this framed picture because it seems only right to give her a place on one of our walls.

I would have written a different ending to this story. In my version, I clean Sarah up as best I can, preserve her in a box, and present her to Norah’s own daughter twenty years from now. I wait until the whole family is there, so we can swap memories together. The girls laugh as they remember there were four different names before Norah finally landed on Sarah, and then the boys pipe in about the time they almost lost her. All the while, Norah’s daughter stares down at the baby doll’s face, and Sarah’s legacy lives on for a new generation.

But that’s not how this story ends. So, we feel our feelings; we cry our tears (Norah and me, exclusively). We keep our eyes open in the garage because you never know, and we hang Sarah’s portrait in the family room. We hold on to the things that are good and true, and hopefully, that’s what will be passed down twenty years from now.

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, good books, and (in a surprising turn of events) bright colors, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram, through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings, or on her Substack, Common Stories.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.

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