Can we talk?

Dolls and Childhood

         I see children playing with a ton of toys and demolishing them. The girls in my family get dolls for a birthday and a month later, "it's head broke off". When my grown nieces were little, they must have had 300 Barbies. They had baskets of Barbies, some without various limbs. My brother said that he needed another house just for toys.

         Things were different when I was growing up. There was plenty of advertising, but kids didn't have the same intense longing to have what everybody else had. Or at least their parents didn't have that longing. I remember Barbie was just getting famous, and I wanted one so badly. Year after year I didn't get one. I'd go to sleep at night thinking about one, and having various outfits I had seen. Finally, when I was too old to play with dolls, my mother got me a Barbie. I still have it.

         In fact, I have almost all my dolls. When I mentioned this one day at a job, a man who had raised three daughters, asked, "Weren't you ever allowed to play with them?" It hit me like a ton of bricks. No, I wasn't. Except for one or two baby dolls that I had before school, all my dolls were kept like treasures. My mother had been very poor and didn't have a lot of toys, probably never a decent doll. So she made me preserve my dolls for my own daughters some day. I could set them up and look at them or lay them in the toy crib, but all I really was allowed to do was dust them off and tidy up. I never had any daughters, but I still have the dolls. They are old fashioned, so today's girls wouldn't like them.

         To be honest, if I had had daughters, I probably would let them only look at my old dolls. They would have to play with new ones. I would let them play with their own things. They could break off the arms, by accident, without fear. But the conditioning is too deep. My old dolls are just keepsakes, not toys. No one can play with them. If I saw a child playing with one of these, I would have a nervous breakdown.

         I have no one to inherit them, so I guess I should try to sell them as antiques. I am old enough, and the dolls with me, to qualify. The money would do me more good when I retire than a doll to dust. But I can't part with them yet. I'm not letting go of the past just yet.