Monday, October 10, 2005

Dolls

Cheryl wrote a lovely post about being five, and Doris followed it up with her experience of being five (which wasn't so pleasant), and mentioned her brother mangling her doll and the trouble it got her into.

I was given a doll when I was five, too, but I'm afraid the person who mangled it was me. I never did figure out what you were supposed to do with dolls. They couldn't climb trees, were useless on bicycles, and when it came to games they just sat there, staring spookily.

In fact I was given two dolls, one by an aunt and the other by a grandmother. (Neither of them knew me very well. OBVIOUSLY.) One doll I mangled in the chain of my bicycle when I took it for a ride and the silly thing just didn't hang on tight enough, and the other ... well, I cut its hair, expecting it to grow back, and then I poked its eyes trying to figure out how they closed when you lay the doll down, and managed to somehow (gag) poke them RIGHT INTO ITS OWN HEAD. I was puzzled and somewhat sickened. I'd only had the doll a couple of days and already it was bald and had holes for eyes, and its eyeballs rattled around in its skull. What kind of toy was that? Useless, creepy thing.

My mother was horrified when she saw what I'd done. She had wanted to take a photo of me holding it to send my grandmother, along with the thank you letter. She took the photo anyway, quickly, before I destroyed the doll completely. With a hat on the doll and from a distance you could hardly tell that it was just a doll corpse.

I gave the other one a haircut, too, in an effort to improve the way it looked, and then it also required a hat. Then I applied Savlon and bandaged its wounded arm and hand very carefully, but it never did heal, and neither of them grew back their hair, so I lost interest.

7 comments:

Cheryl said...

I was given a doll with long hair and my MOTHER cut it.
She said she knew who would be left brushing it out when it looked like a bird's nest. Sadly the hair was knitted in strategically and not all over, so she ended up looking like a monk who'd been mugged.

melinama said...

Whenever I was given a doll I cut off its hair, took off its clothes, and tossed it into dark closet. I had a pile of naked shorn dolls in there. But I turned out to be a wonderful mother. You just never know.

Anonymous said...

yes, i only ever had one barbie. i cut her hair and colored her body with bright colors from markers. after that, my mom let me play with my brothers trucks instead.

kenju said...

I had baby dolls, not Barbie-types, as I predate them considerably. I actually would have rather had trains, but I was/as a good mom too.(And a superb grandma!)

Lippy said...

I used to cut the hair off my dolls and take them on 'adventures' into the bush with the rest of the neighbourhood gang. They managed to survive for a fairly long time. Then again, I never thought there was anything terribly odd about punctured dolls with missing limbs, eyes and hair. It was better them than us...

Badaunt said...

Reading these comments has made me think that perhaps I was a stupid child. It never OCCURRED to me (at the time) that dolls represented babies. I thought they were toys, to play with, and couldn't figure out how.

But there were loads of real babies in my life at that point (including my two baby brothers), so perhaps that is why I never made the connection. The dolls did not fill their diapers (they didn't even have diapers), throw up, scream, smell, fart, burp, or exhibit any other kind of the baby-like behaviour I was familiar with. If they resembled babies at all, they resembled dead babies, and I'm glad I never had THAT thought at the time!

Doris said...

I loved your story of the dolls... and everyone elses! We adults have such expectations of kids and what they should be doing with these toys.

Those closing eyes always baffled me too!

I hated dolls back then but would happily play with them now!