What's in a Doll?
When my Aunt Melinda passed away in 2024, one of the things that was left for me to uncover and redistribute was a trunk full of dolls and doll clothes. I couldn’t bear to part with most of them. I had to look the other direction while placing the ones that were missing limbs in the trash bin. They were precious to her, not to mention the fact that I have an uncanny ability to personify inanimate objects. I had the benefit of not knowing these dolls my whole life the way she did; she would never have thrown any of them away, as is evidenced by the fact that they remained in her estate after her death. Even today, I question whether I did the right thing.
What I did do, however, was select my favorite of Melinda’s favorites, bring her home, wash her dress, and give her a place of honor behind the glass of the barrister bookcase, just below the shadow box that contains mementos of Melinda’s life. I have no idea what name Melinda may have given her, which is unfortunate because I name everything. Every plant, every car, every stuffed animal, every doll. But if I had to give her a name, I guess it would just have to be Melinda. Her yellow dress, lovingly sewn by my grandmother Jessie, was very possibly one of the ones that Melinda packed the day she decided to run away from home, with only dolls and doll clothes in her suitcase. (She only got as far as the corner, as she wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone.)
In addition to the dolls in the trunk, two very important items were lovingly bubble-wrapped and delivered to my parents’ house for me by my Aunt Martha, who was cleaning out Melinda’s home: wooden display cases, built by my father, held dolls that my great-grandmother Flora left to Melinda, then she left to me.
In a series of emails about the Halloween costume, each person excitedly declared which doll they would dress up as. Which combination of clothes and personality and hair color captured their childhood heart and still holds it today?
This all led me to wonder… Why, even as adults, do we still hold such sentiment for dolls? Why do we hold onto them long past the time they begin to fall apart? Why are some disposable and others we display in glass cases or pass down for generations?
My mother distinctly remembers the families of cob dolls she would create as a child, carefully walking the corn rows on our family’s farm near Twitty, Texas, to find the right-size ears to represent mother, father, child, and baby. She looked for long tassels, which would serve as hair. Peeling back only the front of the cob, she used those leaves she removed as belts or scarves, and loaded the family into the wagon that she and her brother Bob would pull out to the end of the road. “As they dried out, they had more features because each one dried differently,” she explains. But these weren’t the type of dolls you save and collect—she would just throw them away and make new ones. “You could always go back and get more,” she reasoned.
Although she had “real” dolls, Mom doesn’t have deeply rooted memories of them, other than a small one that still sits on her shelf, missing one of its braided red pigtails and wearing a crocheted dress that her Grandmother Robinson made. “I had interesting things to do on the farm,” she says. “So I really wasn’t a doll person. I remember being outside a lot, and being with Bob, who wasn’t really interested in playing with dolls.” (And yet, doll person or not, she clearly remembers those corn cobs.)
So what makes a person “a doll person”? Perhaps it’s access (having the extra funds to actually purchase such a thing); perhaps it’s simply the interests of the child. Some think it’s a nurturing instinct that draws us to dolls, but that doesn’t explain people like me, who don’t have a mothering bone in their body, but will 100% jump at the chance to play with vintage paper dolls—or my mother, one of the most nurturing people I know, not being a “doll person.”
To me, the presence of a doll in a child’s life is an emotional support, a built-in friend of your own creation, with none of the flaws and entrapments of real-life friends. It’s an instrument of imaginative play and creative expression. Each doll takes on the life that a child gives it, and that is deeply personal. Some are collected behind glass, representing a memory of where it was purchased or who saw it in a shop and thought of us. Others are stained with tears from childhood traumas, or with dirt from serving as co-creator in the design of a girl-made river flowing through the flower garden, or with sticky sap from the willow tree under which they served as co-pilot on the Starship Enterprise.
Dolls are the embodiment of possibilities that we once imagined and reminders of what we aspired to be, if we had the ability to fashion ourselves (and the world) in any way we wanted.
No wonder it’s so difficult to part with them.
Aside: I’d always wanted a Madame Alexander doll, but they were more expensive than most. Not long ago, I decided to buy one for myself—after all, I’m a grown adult now and can spend my money however I want to. I picked one to purchase on Ebay (I’m not frivolous, after all). I was so excited when it arrived, but when the time came to put it into the curio, it didn’t fit. It didn’t fit physically or metaphorically. It didn’t hold the same meaning as the others.
And so, it remained in the box at the top of the closet for many months before I finally started feeling bad for her. She didn’t ask for that kind of treatment. So now, she’s been added (and a teddy bear given to me by a close friend when I graduated from college had to cede its place in the curio); but she still feels a little like—well, I started to say a step-child, but most people love their step-children as much as their own. She feels out of place; like a stranger who walked into my living room and plopped down uninvited. It’s not her fault. I hope the longer she stays, the more that feeling will fade. Maybe I’ll get her a friend so they can be new together.
What I did do, however, was select my favorite of Melinda’s favorites, bring her home, wash her dress, and give her a place of honor behind the glass of the barrister bookcase, just below the shadow box that contains mementos of Melinda’s life. I have no idea what name Melinda may have given her, which is unfortunate because I name everything. Every plant, every car, every stuffed animal, every doll. But if I had to give her a name, I guess it would just have to be Melinda. Her yellow dress, lovingly sewn by my grandmother Jessie, was very possibly one of the ones that Melinda packed the day she decided to run away from home, with only dolls and doll clothes in her suitcase. (She only got as far as the corner, as she wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone.)
In addition to the dolls in the trunk, two very important items were lovingly bubble-wrapped and delivered to my parents’ house for me by my Aunt Martha, who was cleaning out Melinda’s home: wooden display cases, built by my father, held dolls that my great-grandmother Flora left to Melinda, then she left to me.
It’s important to understand that I’m a doll person. The dolls I collect for display had always been behind the doors of a giant mid-wall to ceiling doll case that my father built and anchored to the wall in the bedroom I shared with my sister Kefalari when we were young. Her dolls were on one side and wore mostly blue; mine on the other, wearing exclusively shades of pink. When I moved out on my own, the very first (actually, only) piece of furniture I bought for myself was a curio cabinet to store my doll collection. There was no way I was leaving my dolls at my parents’ house; that would be like leaving behind your beloved pet. No. Way.
In addition to the doll case, I had an army of Barbies and stuffed animals, which I spent hours with, playing by myself. When I was a teenager and “too old” for stuffed animals, Dad placed cup hooks in neat rows on the ceiling of my bedroom, where I subsequently tied fishing line under the arms of each of my beloved friends (to put it around their neck would be inhumane) and hung them on the ceiling where I could stare up at them as I lay in bed each night. Those, too, have been released from our family home. I did have to part with a few of the ones that for whatever reason held less meaning for me. They included ones that were given as a free gift with something else or that weren’t as soft and cuddly as the others. It was a very serious undertaking, done many years ago, and I still remember crying.
Last week, a friend visited my home to begin a process she calls “Marie Condo-ing my life.” As I toured her around my overflowing storage spaces, she commented on the number of closets that contained stuffed animals and dolls, lined up along the shelf peering out at her. She suggested that we should combine them into one place; I would consider it, as long as every one of them is still able to sit comfortably facing out. And my white bear Sarah must stay with the love of her life, my yellow bear Sam. And the bunny April should probably stay with them, too, because she’s Sarah’s best friend. And the monkey mama Tippy, has to stay with the monkey papa (who is missing a foot and remains unnamed because he belonged to my dad when he was a child), and her baby monkey (whose name is inexplicably missing from my memory).
But, I digress.
Recently, our Halloween-minded folks at work chose a very interesting theme for this year’s employee group costume: American Girl Dolls. Although my childhood predates American Girl Dolls, I immediately thought of My Friend Jenny. She was one of my absolute favorites and holds a place of honor in my great-grandfather ZR’s trunk, where I keep some of my most treasured possessions. (She’s in worse shape than I remembered.)
Last week, a friend visited my home to begin a process she calls “Marie Condo-ing my life.” As I toured her around my overflowing storage spaces, she commented on the number of closets that contained stuffed animals and dolls, lined up along the shelf peering out at her. She suggested that we should combine them into one place; I would consider it, as long as every one of them is still able to sit comfortably facing out. And my white bear Sarah must stay with the love of her life, my yellow bear Sam. And the bunny April should probably stay with them, too, because she’s Sarah’s best friend. And the monkey mama Tippy, has to stay with the monkey papa (who is missing a foot and remains unnamed because he belonged to my dad when he was a child), and her baby monkey (whose name is inexplicably missing from my memory).
But, I digress.
Recently, our Halloween-minded folks at work chose a very interesting theme for this year’s employee group costume: American Girl Dolls. Although my childhood predates American Girl Dolls, I immediately thought of My Friend Jenny. She was one of my absolute favorites and holds a place of honor in my great-grandfather ZR’s trunk, where I keep some of my most treasured possessions. (She’s in worse shape than I remembered.)
In a series of emails about the Halloween costume, each person excitedly declared which doll they would dress up as. Which combination of clothes and personality and hair color captured their childhood heart and still holds it today?
This all led me to wonder… Why, even as adults, do we still hold such sentiment for dolls? Why do we hold onto them long past the time they begin to fall apart? Why are some disposable and others we display in glass cases or pass down for generations?
My mother distinctly remembers the families of cob dolls she would create as a child, carefully walking the corn rows on our family’s farm near Twitty, Texas, to find the right-size ears to represent mother, father, child, and baby. She looked for long tassels, which would serve as hair. Peeling back only the front of the cob, she used those leaves she removed as belts or scarves, and loaded the family into the wagon that she and her brother Bob would pull out to the end of the road. “As they dried out, they had more features because each one dried differently,” she explains. But these weren’t the type of dolls you save and collect—she would just throw them away and make new ones. “You could always go back and get more,” she reasoned.
Although she had “real” dolls, Mom doesn’t have deeply rooted memories of them, other than a small one that still sits on her shelf, missing one of its braided red pigtails and wearing a crocheted dress that her Grandmother Robinson made. “I had interesting things to do on the farm,” she says. “So I really wasn’t a doll person. I remember being outside a lot, and being with Bob, who wasn’t really interested in playing with dolls.” (And yet, doll person or not, she clearly remembers those corn cobs.)
So what makes a person “a doll person”? Perhaps it’s access (having the extra funds to actually purchase such a thing); perhaps it’s simply the interests of the child. Some think it’s a nurturing instinct that draws us to dolls, but that doesn’t explain people like me, who don’t have a mothering bone in their body, but will 100% jump at the chance to play with vintage paper dolls—or my mother, one of the most nurturing people I know, not being a “doll person.”
To me, the presence of a doll in a child’s life is an emotional support, a built-in friend of your own creation, with none of the flaws and entrapments of real-life friends. It’s an instrument of imaginative play and creative expression. Each doll takes on the life that a child gives it, and that is deeply personal. Some are collected behind glass, representing a memory of where it was purchased or who saw it in a shop and thought of us. Others are stained with tears from childhood traumas, or with dirt from serving as co-creator in the design of a girl-made river flowing through the flower garden, or with sticky sap from the willow tree under which they served as co-pilot on the Starship Enterprise.
Dolls are the embodiment of possibilities that we once imagined and reminders of what we aspired to be, if we had the ability to fashion ourselves (and the world) in any way we wanted.
No wonder it’s so difficult to part with them.
Aside: I’d always wanted a Madame Alexander doll, but they were more expensive than most. Not long ago, I decided to buy one for myself—after all, I’m a grown adult now and can spend my money however I want to. I picked one to purchase on Ebay (I’m not frivolous, after all). I was so excited when it arrived, but when the time came to put it into the curio, it didn’t fit. It didn’t fit physically or metaphorically. It didn’t hold the same meaning as the others.
And so, it remained in the box at the top of the closet for many months before I finally started feeling bad for her. She didn’t ask for that kind of treatment. So now, she’s been added (and a teddy bear given to me by a close friend when I graduated from college had to cede its place in the curio); but she still feels a little like—well, I started to say a step-child, but most people love their step-children as much as their own. She feels out of place; like a stranger who walked into my living room and plopped down uninvited. It’s not her fault. I hope the longer she stays, the more that feeling will fade. Maybe I’ll get her a friend so they can be new together.
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