![]() There’s no Save-The-World-From-Its-Own-Folly Barbie. The mother trails the girl as she walks up and down the aisle filled with Barbies of every profession-Doctor Barbie, Chef Barbie, Forest Ranger Barbie-each sheathed in tight-fitting fashions and stilettoes. That it doesn’t represent what real girls and women look like and that such dolls encourage an emphasis on looks over intellect, creativity, and compassion. So she tells the girl she will buy the Barbie but first she wants to tell her some things about the doll. But the girl asks and asks, and so the mother thinks that denying her the Barbie will only make it more desirable. The mother says, “No, sorry, that is not an appropriate toy” when the girl asks for a Barbie. The father who read no parenting books said, “If we ignore her, she’ll stop.” The mother recognized this strategy as the same one men in power applied to climate change, their heads in the warming sand.ĭ is for doll. The daughter threw the crayons across the room or stuffed them in her mouth, chewed them and spewed the pieces like a mad fountain. “Draw how you feel.” It’s what the parenting books said to do. “Here, draw a picture,” the mother told the daughter when she was younger and her tantrums raged and raged. Where is the love in that? Somewhere deep inside, the mother assures herself. What of the literal scratches and bites, the kicks and punches? The name-calling. ![]() But there is the question of her daughter’s love language. As if the girl reads the mother’s mind, she says, “Scratches and bites are their love language.” Maybe they’re mine, too, the mother thinks. Cats can’t talk, the mother wants to say, but doesn’t. As do the good old days.Ĭ is for cat, the only one who truly loves her, the girl says. She speaks her mind and that is a good thing, the mother reasons, though never would the mother have said such a thing to her own mother. And now the mother has raised a daughter who is not afraid to say things to her mother. But she had been a girl once and at least knew what that was like, and she knew what not to do, having been raised by a mother who did not believe in herself and so did not believe in her own daughter. She, from a family of few males, had no clue how to raise a boy. When the mother learned she was pregnant, she hoped for a girl to whom she could say, “You are capable, you are strong, you are brave.” When she birthed a girl, she was relieved. The mother remembers her girlhood, its limitations, its confidence-crushing indifference to her existence. Still, the mother wants to shout that she already is a better mother. Be a better mother! There is no definition of better mother in the dictionary, despite its common usage in the lexicon of enraged daughters. Just the thought of the menace was enough to unleash panic in the mother’s body, and thus the baby’s.ī is for better. Sometimes the mother thinks of the Chernobyl cloud that floated across the northern hemisphere when the girl was still in utero–a third-trimester fetus whose organs were still elaborating upon themselves, readying her for life outside the mother’s body. The mother is sad for these women and, not daring to consider the question of who went wrong, wonders what went wrong. The guests were members of a support group whose teenage daughters had ceased speaking to them. Just that afternoon, the mother had turned on a TV talk show while the girl napped. Her girl is a toddler, climbing on her lap, declaring “I like you best, Mama.” The mother smiles both at the truth and fickleness of this statement as the father sits nearby intent on the newspaper. The mother’s mouth contorts with a bittersweet memory. But these are not either/or propositions, not stand-alone options. The mother thinks how much easier the first is. Don’t let me be alone, she demands louder.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |