Mothers In Training: Baby Dolls and Barbies
Mothers in training, I’ve learned, begins in childhood. One memorable Christmas as a young girl, I received the one thing I’d wished for—a Baby That-A-Way doll. Thanks to a battery pack, my baby doll would slowly crawl on her hands and knees down our carpeted hallway. I patiently followed behind to protect her from any potential threats.
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Becoming a Caretaker
Being the caretaker of a baby doll demands the best of a child, and is something most children take seriously. As children, we nurture, protect, and care for babies, whispering in the softest of tones.
Caring for my baby dolls as a young girl was perfect practice for the many years I would spend caring for my younger siblings: dressing, feeding, comforting, playing.
When I was ten, I held my baby sister in my arms and cradled her, just as I had done with my baby dolls. A few short months later, when a fire broke out in our home in the depths of the night, just outside my baby sister’s bedroom window, I was the one sent to rescue her from her crib in a smoke-filled room, while the other children were awakened by our parents and rushed out of the burning house, into the dark night. At my young age, I had become a protector of children.
The World of Barbies
Fast forward to my pre-teen years when my baby dolls were replaced by barbie dolls. With modest barbie-sized clothing, handmade by my mother, and a handmade ‘house’, made of rolled-up washcloths spread across the floor in an attempt to create separate rooms, my barbies lived a middle-class life.
My barbie play time was split between three things:
- creating grown-up stories for each barbie to be part of
- dreaming of the barbie mobile and barbie mansion I wished I could own,
- and observing the dolls’ anatomy with curiosity as I changed outfits. I often wondered, Is this what women’s bodies are supposed to look like? When no one was looking, I’d even sneak in a kiss between Barbie and Ken.
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Baby Sister
After I married and had children of my own, I watched as they nurtured and cared for their babydolls. They practiced, through play, the art of putting another’s needs ahead of one’s own.
When we announced to our oldest child that she was going to be a big sister, she spent months caring for her baby doll. This love and care naturally transferred over to her new baby sister the moment she came home from the hospital.
Baby Doll Heirlooms
Years later, as I look at the old-fashioned baby dolls that have been handed down to my daughters by their grandmothers, there is no doubt in my mind that those baby dolls were loved and cared for, just as mine and my daughters’ baby dolls had been. These dolls will be passed down for generations as a legacy of love. A love that began decades ago, when each grandmother was gifted a baby doll and, in turn, learned the value of nurturing.
Conclusion
My baby dolls helped me learn at an early age how to nurture, protect, and sacrifice for those who are most vulnerable: babies and children.
My barbies, accompanied by my never-ending ‘entitlement barbie accessories wishlists’, grownup-themed storylines, and anatomical curiosities, never did any of that.
Motherhood is more than bearing children…It is the essence of who we are as women.”
SHERI L. DEW
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Quotes about Dolls
“I loved my baby dolls when I was a kid. I used to pray with them and say good night to each and every one of them because I didn’t want their feelings to get hurt. I remember having that connection with my baby dolls.”
Jessica Alba
“Dolls are safe companions.”
Louisa May Alcott
“There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.”
John Ortberg
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
Mark Twain
“To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.”
Annie Besant
“A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children.”
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
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Quotes about Babies
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
Carl Sandburg
“Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
A.A. Milne
“Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.”
Kate Douglas Wiggin
“If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.”
Vincent Van Gogh
“God does not reveal himself in strength or power, but in the weakness and fragility of a newborn babe.”
Pope Francis
“Babies are such a nice way to start people.”
Don Herald
Art Credit:
Gretchen’s Favorite by Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meyer_von_Bremen_Gretchens_Liebling_1881.jpg {{PD-US}}
