I used to read the celeb bashing news/blog Defamer quite a bit in the early widowed days. It was funny. Mean. Biting. Sarcastic. And really, really funny. Except for the grocery check-out displays of the obligatory mags designed to make me feel inferior and underprivileged in comparison to the rich and famous of the world (and whenever Rob visits WWTDD and reads me the more outrageous stuff), I don’t get much celeb news reverent or otherwise. However I was tag surfing here at WordPress and ran across a Defamer piece on Brad and Angie’s menagerie of wee ones that I had to share. Seems all is not peaceful or blended in a home with four very small children too closely spaced in age and acquistion. The boys fight and the girls fight and apparently all three of the adopted ones beat on the bio-baby. Not only that but in order to get a moment’s peace, Brad and Angie – the Dalia Lama eqvialents of parents – feed their children junk food! Makes you smile a bit, doesn’t it? To know that even parents with staff can’t crowd control any better than normal parents. What was really funny about the article was the comments. Most of the people replying shared stories of their own war-torn childhoods and sibling unrest. My own family is comprised of four children. We fall in a five year age span that conspired to make my mother’s life such that when warm weather finally arrived in the late spring, she would send us all outdoors as soon as breakfast was over and lock the screen doors, front and back, behind us. We were only allowed in to pee. If we needed water, there was a hose in the yard. At lunch she would call us to the picnic table and feed us sandwiches and kool-aid. Afterwards she would cart everything back inside along with anyone young enough to nap and the rest of us were locked out again until just before my father would get home from work. Nothing Brady Bunch or Mama Partridge about that. News that the oldest Jolie-Pitt son was beating on the younger reminded me of the many times I pummeled my little brother. Right up until the day he chased me through the house trying to poke me with a wooden pole attached to a flag we’d gotten for the fourth of July. I managed to slam my bedroom door shut just as he launched the thing at me javelin style. It drilled a hole right through the door. We covered it up with an Andy Gibb poster on one side and Shaun Cassidy on the other. It was a month or more before our mom discovered it and we were forced to confess to the hole’s origins. The hole is still there. My dad was too cheap to replace a whole door just for a little hole. Sibling spacing. A lesson for us all.
Childhood
Jordan was remarking about her own willingness and ability to play with Katy. A friend had been asking her what it was like to have such a young step-sister and if she found it difficult to play imaginary games with her. Jordan admitted that she did find it hard and wondered when we lose the ability to do that and why. I have to admit that I didn’t have much of an answer for her though I share the dilemma. Katy is always after me to play with her. The game of choice where I am concerned is house, a game I didn’t play much at all when I was a child of five and find in more dull now. Unlike my daughter, I had chores from a young age. Making my bed, picking up my room every night, helping with supper dishes which progressed quickly to the point where at 9 or so, my sister and I were left with the supper remains to clear and wash up. House was not a game. It was a series of lesson designed to prepare me for my life’s eventual part-time and then full-time work. Or at least that is how my parents saw it.
I however that the real reason I lost my ability to play is that in choosing to marry and become a mother, I surrendered my right to down time. I wasn’t able to retreat to my own space anymore because I was sharing it all the time. Before, when I tired of company, conversation, interacting on any level – I could go home. To my apartment or my house. A place that was just mine and where I could do or not, read and write, go for a run or to the mall without taking anyone else’s needs or wants into account. In regards to the children I knew back then, I was much like an aunt or a grandparent in that I could leave when it wasn’t fun for me anymore. You can’t do that when it is your own child.
In terms of imagination, I haven’t lost mine anymore, I think, than Jordan has misplaced hers, it is just a grown-up’s version of one. No matter what we say, we all grow up and become conscious of the world around us. Our needs and interests change to reflect who we are becoming and however similar my imaginings may be to the child I was, I have other ways of expressing and meeting those needs now.
I think too that the grown-up disinterest in play as a child knows it is nature’s way of letting children develop that part of themselves without adult input and interference. Imagine if grown-ups did enjoy the long bouts of play that children demand. Children are already programmed to allow too much to be done for them. Would they develop any true self-interests or ability to think for themselves if bossy parents were inclined to play with them? Maybe that sounds self-serving. Maybe it is self-serving. I don’t remember my parents really playing with me beyond my father teaching me to play ball or my mother reading to me when I was very small. I don’t know that I knew any adults who played with children. So why do I sometimes feel bad that I don’t always play when Katy asks and that I often don’t find what she wants to do interesting?
Last weekend, we built a fort, and I enjoyed doing that with her, but once the fort was built and she wanted to continue playing clubhouse – I wasn’t as interested. And it’s not that I don’t have an imagination or that I don’t engage that side of myself anymore. I can lose myself in a daydream as easily now as I could as a child. I can create stories even more easily than I could way back when. I’m just not interested in being childlike. Which is interesting because isn’t that touted as this great attribute for artists to have? I am not so sure.
Still, an interesting question and on-going conundrum.
My mother made a little pink coat for my Barbie doll when I was about ten years old. She made dresses and pants too. I rescued them from a basement purging Mom conducted the summer before last. She sold many of our old Fisher-Price toys, collectors items that she could have made real money off of on eBay were she not a complete Luddite when it comes to the Internet. The clothes were in an old play suitcase that I used to us when we would take little trips. They were musty from years under the basement steps and Katy eyed them dubiously when I told her enthusiastically that they would fit her dolls. She clearly had reservations about allowing these smelly old rags anywhere near her dolls, forget about on them. But, I took them back to Des Moines with us and washed them a time or two and though a bit tattered, they served.
The dolls’ clothing was a mixture of regular size dolls and Barbie clothes. Some of the doll clothing was for baby dolls and some were made especially for the Crissy and Velvet dolls that my sister and I had gotten for Christmas one year. Do you remember those dolls? The ones with the I Dream of Jeannie knots on the tops of their heads that you could pull the pony tail out for long hair and wind back up inside them with a round knob on the back? My father didn’t understand why any of our dolls needed more clothing than what came on their backs, so my mother ended up finding patterns and buying material, snaps, buttons and ribbons to make doll clothing for us. If my father had known how much the materials cost or the amount of time Mom put into the creation of these tiny wardrobes, he might have just let her take us out to buy the extra clothing for which we were clamoring.
I was reminded of just how much went into each piece when one of the buttons came off the pink coat and needed to be sewn back on. Rob took the tiny pearl-like thing from Katy and immediately handed it off to me, pronouncing it to microscopic for him, and it was very, very small. The head of a pencil eraser is bigger than those buttons. As I worked on replacing and subsequently tightening up the hold on the other buttons, I marveled at what close and intricate work this was with a needle and thread and how skilled a seamstress one would have to be to cobble together such tiny garments on a sewing machine. My mom had a Singer machine in a stand alone desk that she could fold the sewer into before closing the lid atop it. It was rarely every put away when I was young. Mom sewed, it seemed to me, all the time. She made clothes for our dolls, us, and herself. I think there was even one point when darn near everything she wore, she had cut from a McCalls or Butterick pattern and sewed together herself.
The two (miserable) years I spent in 4H, I learned to sew as well, but I never loved it. I found it tedious and thought the clothing made me look frumpier than I knew I was. No one wore homemade clothing when I was 12, except for the halter tops that nearly every girl I knew, younger and older, were wearing but which I was not allowed. I don’t know if it was because I was wearing a bra by then (a training one but according to my parents – that counted) or because I was fat and neither of my parents could stomach the idea of my pudgy (not little – I was already 5’ 6”) self’s rolly flesh showing (and in case you think I might be putting thoughts into their heads, my younger sister was allowed to prance about the neighborhood in halters and bikini tops until we were both well into our high school years). But, I just didn’t see the point of sewing your own clothes unless you were good enough at it that no one could discern your homemade from the store bought. That is just a gift. Mom had it sort of but I didn’t and still don’t.
Mom got her sewing gene from her mother. My grandmother’s doll clothes and tiny quilts still survive and Katy has several of them today among her play things. She likes the blankets especially and I have to admit that I love the fact that they have survived and she is playing with them. Same goes for the Barbie ward robe and doll clothes. There are many kinds of heirlooms but the ones I like best are the things that a person uses and then passes to the next generation for their use too.
anniegirl1138 