Playing House

I run from the house, pushing the dusty screen from its window frame and sliding my body down the stucco side. I am seven when I run, my fingertips soiled by the escape, my palms and little-girl thighs scratched by the rough wall, the resistance, the dirt upon impact. This is the first time I learn that freedom hurts. I run because the lines between fantasy and reality have begun to bleed, because already I realize that playing dolls is practice for a lifetime of holding up another. I run because though I love my baby dolls, they grow heavy in my arms, and because everyone around me says the plastic bottle is empty, the diaper full. Because the play kitchen is already on fire.

My play then was grounded in caretaking, like it is for many girls who receive dolls and are instructed to devote themselves to caring for another, to delight in this performance.

My first doll was a tiny contradiction with a soft cloth body and hard plastic arms—to love such a thing was not easy. The doll’s limbs splayed wide open as though it were a starfish or startled animal rather than something to swaddle and hold to your heart. It was a disconcerting pose, the Moro reflex when infants frighten and spread their arms wide in fear before curling in on themselves like a comma. Though the posture was meant to ease the dressing and undressing of the doll, part of the play of diapering and bathing, it taught me early on that babies are fearful, wary, that a mother’s job is to convince a child to trust her. That bedtime kisses may not change plasticity.

I named this doll Peepers because when I was an infant, my mother thought I looked like a hungry bird holding open my mouth. I transferred this name to my doll the way self-important men bequeath their names to their sons. Like most infants, the doll had the face of an old man, wrinkled and ornery, and a bald head with large unblinking eyes. Protect me, the doll seemed to plead. Hold me, but understand I cannot hold you in return.

Peepers was exceedingly frightening, a frozen, fearful star, cold to the touch, whose plastic quickly brittled and discolored, limbs lined with brown spots like bruises. Because it was the early ’90s, my father joked that they were AIDS spots, laughing loud about fags and queers with my uncles and grandfathers. But when I asked what that meant, worried about the mysterious illness, I was told to keep quiet, which was confusing, because weren’t we supposed to keep babies safe?

I toted Peepers around the house much of my own toddlerhood. Loving Peepers required humility—I never held baby enough, fed baby enough, changed baby enough.

“Look at your baby,” my mother, aunts, cousins, and grandmother would say, pointing me away to tend to my pretend child. They spoke with such certainty—as if they would oversee that I completed my work—that it seemed they did not realize the difference between real life and make-believe. When I protested, dropped my baby on the ground because chores were not play, just like plastic was not a person, I was scolded.

“Be nice to your baby,” they would admonish me, instructing me to complete the task again until I got it right. My play was performance requiring criticism—I acted from the script and the audience provided notes.

Over the years I acquired other dolls. A hard plastic doll whose jeweled crown and bracelet and belly button lit up with flashing lights when you hugged her. A porcelain ballerina whose perfection—coiffed hair, rosebud mouth, willowy body—signaled to all that she would eventually shatter. A look-but-don’t-touch doll weighted down with a heavy beaded gown. Dolls of every ethnicity, prices marked up to signify that diversity is only for those with the privilege to afford it. A growing bin of Barbies whose endless careers as veterinarian, pilot, and firefighter did not mean they were without plastic heels or placid Ken.

When I was seven, my parents bought me an American Girl doll, the deluxe doll for any girl growing up in the ’90s; not only did the franchise come with a hefty price tag, easily the cost of several weeks’ worth of groceries, but custom catalogs advertised extensive wardrobes for each doll—shirts, skirts, sweaters, and socks. Embroidered coats, fur-lined muffs, patent heels, boots with shoestring laces. My own doll came with a jaunty beret and gold-rimmed glasses. She was Molly, a responsible smart girl with a streak of stubbornness, the catalog explained. Just like me.

I did as expected—I loved my doll, my new role, immediately.

My parents gave Molly to me just before my nap, letting me unwrap the paper to find a glossy box underneath, the doll’s friendly face underneath the clear plastic. Even as a child, I knew the luxury of this toy, had coveted my schoolfriends’ dolls, convinced I would never own one because my family lived miles and towns away from those girls, barely scraped by, the end of each work week dubbed “Friday Fight Night” by my parents, who sat together at the table with their paychecks, boxing bills and (verbally) sometimes each other to make our expenses work.

My parents reassured me I was a big girl and could be trusted with this luxurious responsibility. And then they sent me to bed because I was still a girl who needed to listen, who must always earn pleasure. When I woke, rubbed sleep from my eyes, and saw that Molly was still there, painted freckles and gapped teeth, my parents let me open the box and hold her so very carefully. And then they told me about something else I would need to hold carefully, something more permanent—a sister.

“Sissy,” my mother renamed me in this moment. No one in my family has called me anything since.

My mother and I spent her maternity leave together. She prepared to be a good mother and I learned to be a good sister. This was the longest time we’d ever had alone together, time with her being something I’d coveted. All my life I’d gone with her to the preschool where she worked, first as a student and later before and after school. But while we were there, she was not my mother; I was just one of many children. At work with her, I missed her terribly. At home, however, we watched soap operas and made Top Ramen, cracking swirly eggs into the steaming water, watching them solidify. I hated the eggs but loved the salty packets bursting with flavor. We ate together, slurping, at the table, and I hoped life would be warm and delicious like this forever.

Sometimes we watched TV. We had only one channel in our rural town, so midday I would plead to skip my nap and to cuddle instead, and my exhausted mother would acquiesce and pull me into her increasingly crowded lap to watch Days of Our Lives. Like sand through the hourglass, I knew our time alone together was slipping away. The women were glamorous, not like me or mom or all the women in our family, working women who wore whatever had been on sale many years before at the Kmart. No, these women wore beautiful gowns and makeup, and they didn’t take nonsense from anyone, raising their voices, even at the men—which I’d never seen a woman in my family do—storming out of rooms while the music swelled.

As my mother’s due date drew near, we watched campaign coverage. George Bush was a friendly old man that wagged his finger on TV and spoke for his white-haired wife. He looked like my mother’s father, who bossed my grandmother around and slipped me butterscotch candies to keep me quiet. Bill Clinton played the saxophone big and loud and had an accent like sugar, and though my father liked him, he did not like his wife because she did not smile enough and said that she didn’t intend to stay home baking cookies. When my father started ranting about her—something he would do for the next thirty years—I smiled and brought him fake cookies from my kitchen. Ross Perot would never win, my parents said, but he was rich enough to buy a place on the campaign trail, which meant he was allowed to take up space onstage during debates. Even as a child I knew he was a poor orator, that he had no substance behind his claims, that he was more interested in having a captive audience. I knew nothing of politics, but when we flipped through the channels, I recognized these men—their mild distaste for women and their wants, the same as the men in my family who thought me and my mother silly but who would still lose their tempers if we dared disagree.

My mother went into labor on election night, birthing a girl who, as she grew, would witness the birth of a frightening new nation for women. I was frightened from the start of her arrival, because only bad things happened in the middle of the night—suicide attempts, stroke, fire. No sooner had my mother woken me to say that the baby was coming than she was leaving me, rushing with my father to a hospital forty-five minutes away in a city we rarely visited. On the way, they dropped me off with my mother’s stern boss, and I watched my family drive away in the dark.

A baby, my mother’s boss scolded, was nothing to cry about.

When I went to the hospital the following day, my mother was pale and exhausted in bed, tubes in her arms. My father stood beside her like he didn’t know what to do with himself. What I remember most, though, is that when I looked up, blood was spattered on the ceiling.

Though my mother protested, the doctor said I was a big girl and sat me down, placing the new baby in my arms. An only child to this point—my half brother was sixteen years older and long out of the house—I was transfixed. This new sister seemed like a living doll.

Part perfection, part obligation.

Throughout my girlhood, my mother sometimes shows me the dolls hidden in her closet. Their plastic faces are warped with time, their clothes faded as if by the sun, though they have been kept in the dark for forty years.

There is a brittle Thumbelina, teaching girls that to shrink is divine, and a soft baby Tender Love, with a plush, pliable body to teach girls they are to be molded. And there’s the Raggedy Ann doll my mother’s sister used to steal and torment while my mother howled, the one my septuagenarian aunt still asks about with a cruel glint in her eye.

While we are waiting for the baby to arrive, or later when the baby is napping and my exhausted mother gives me special attention, we take my mother’s dolls down from the shelf. As we sit on the floor, my mother shares these relics from her childhood, a time she doesn’t speak of often. I’ll learn later that her father was an abusive alcoholic, that her early years were shaped by fear and reaction, darkness and pain. But when she holds her dolls, cradles them in her arms like they’re real, or hands them gently to me so that we can share in the play, she smiles with an easy comfort she rarely displays outside the safety of our home.

“I always liked playing dollies,” she says, making her baby pretend to walk across the carpet and talk bravely—like my shy mother and I never are but wish we could be. To my delight, she walks her across the hall, opening her bedroom door to reveal a “store” of homemade doll dresses and tiny crocheted blankets. “The girls at school outgrew them before I did. They liked to talk about boys and makeup, and I just wanted to play dolls.”

I want to go back in time to my lonely mother and sit with her on the playground. I want to go to her house after school to play dolls and giggle and make her—make me—feel less alone. But I know she never invited friends over, unsure what she would find when she opened the front door.

I imagine my mother in her room while her father raged in the dark and her own mother cowered, trapped in the house with that man and their mistake. I imagine my mother holding her dolls as though she were holding herself. I imagine her singing sweetly to them the way she sings John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to me when we drive along the dusty back roads.

She talks to her dolls the way she talks to my baby sister Natalie, who will tattoo Denver’s lyrics down her spine one day to carry my mother with her always, like directions to find her way home.

Together we play protectors. We sit cross-legged on the floor like we’re the same age. We escape time and expectations and crying women and angry men. We make the world the way we want. We protect the dolls like we protect each other. Like we wish we could protect ourselves.

Then my sister cries and my father calls for my mother and the spell is broken.

In memory, I am ageless. I might as well be twelve, when my mother announced we would be starting foster care for children in need, a cycle that would last the next twenty years and more children than I can count or remember. I might as well be thirteen, when my two-year-old twin siblings (a boy and a girl) arrived. I might as well be twenty-one, when two more brothers, ages two and three, arrived. Or twenty-two, when another sister, this time age fifteen, appeared. Or twenty-three, when my mother opened a home daycare and filled the house with a dozen children each day and long into the night. And all the ages and foster children between.

I might as well be twenty-five, when the questions about marriage began; thirty, when my partner’s boss asked my age at the company Christmas party, tapping his finger on the table as he told me “Tick, tick.” I was thirty-one, then thirty-two, and friends placed their children in my arms while they asked, “When are you having children?”

I knew how to hold those children because I had been playing dolls my whole life, a clever disguise for the labor of holding another up—to your hip, your breast, in front of your very face. In my memory I am ageless, and though I love my baby dolls, they grow heavy in my arms, plastic bottle empty, the diaper full. The play kitchen already on fire.

I am seven when I run. I am not tall enough to reach from the window to the ground, and my legs dangle over the height before I fall. No one follows me. I do not leave Molly or my other babies in danger. No, I tuck them into their wooden beds lined up neatly beside my own, a reminder of duty. I brush their hair and hold spoons to their lips so they will not know the hunger already beginning to claw its way up my throat, a hunger I wonder if my mother shares, for she seems always to long for sweetness, sips Diet Coke after Diet Coke like all the women in my family who sit though Weight Watchers meetings, each desperate for something that cannot be satisfied.

I know I have to run, but I do not want to leave my mother. Who will play dolls with her if I am gone? Who will watch soap operas to see if the woman trapped in the well ever escapes? Who will tell her that I love her even though I long to leave? That wanting to run doesn’t mean you don’t love the country roads?

It will be years before I see my mother look over her children’s heads to the horizon, her eyes slick with want. But surely, I already sense her neediness. I know who takes care of babies, but I wonder who takes care of mothers? After my sister was born, I watched others ignore my mother’s sweet face to look at the squirming bundle in her arms. “Look at my mother,” I wanted to shout, “She made this.” The song we sang in school about God was wrong. My mother was the one with the whole world in her hands.

“Run,” I want to whisper into her soft side, when I curl beside her and the baby. When she closes the bathroom door to cry.

I do not want my dolls to miss me, but I want my mother to miss me. I want her to know something of the desperate love I feel for her, the ache to be by her side. I am no different than the squirming thing in her arms—mouth pink and open and wailing.

Though I don’t like when my mother critiques the care I take of my dolls—she points out if I handle them roughly, if I do not change their clothes, if I am not eager to hold fake peas and carrots to their mouths—I have already begun to critique the care my mother takes of me.

I wonder when I learned to associate motherhood with criticism, with enduring the burden of others’ expectations. On television, perfect mothers stayed at home like in Growing Pains or managed to “have it all” because of their sensitive husbands as in The Cosby Show—though we later learned the painful truth about America’s favorite dad. Mothers who failed were selfish sluts like Peg Bundy in Married . . . with Children or fat working-class slobs like Roseanne. In songs, Boyz II Men praised their mamas and a drug-addled Ozzy Osbourne felt called home by his. Mothers, the world insisted, were perfect or terrible, our best friends or worst enemies, the ones to heal or hurt us.

Fathers, on the other hand, did not garner such expectations and thus did not endure such criticism. My father did not hold my baby dolls, just as he rarely held his new baby. Our play mirrored the work that kept him occupied much of the time. He gave me a rock polisher that turned basic gray stones round and round like the cement mixer at the construction sites where he worked, though it made smooth jewels instead of the clods that caked his boots. We turned the machine each night, talking about what promise awaited us—gems of speckled green like a tortoise shell or slate gray like a dove’s eye: we didn’t know, wonder fueling our play, possibility limitless. When at last my father opened the polisher and poured the smooth and cool stones into my hands, I gasped at the sensation and color—it was as though a kaleidoscope filled my palm—and longed to place one on each of my closed eyes, my heart, in the hollow of my neck, so that I might feel more fully what I’d made.

Our other game involved another kind of treasure—trinkets I pulled from a tiny hole I dug in the earth of our backyard. A delicate decorative silver spoon, a metal stamp, fool’s gold to add to my growing rock collection—my fascination with creation driven more by geology than maternal biology. I’d sit at my father’s side, digging spoon in my hands, and imagine myself a construction worker like him: someone who made the world into what he wanted, who dealt in borders and boundaries rather than bottles and bodies.

No matter how much I dug, the hole never seemed to grow (as an adult I learned my father filled it in with treasures and soil when I wasn’t looking). I didn’t see this as Sisyphean, though, but as a reminder that my desires were limitless, that I could dig for what I coveted and grasp it. That I would never need to look to the horizon, eyes slick with want.

When I am seven, I run to the future, to an abstraction, a possibility. The present is oppressive, heavy, full of the binary between caretaker and adventurer. I feel, already, torn.

So I run. I pack my tiny backpack with books—scientists, astronauts, a princess, of course, though I like her wicked stepmother more—and sneak to the kitchen where I stand on my tiptoes to reach the counters I will one day rule. I pack the last donuts from the pink box to sustain me. Later, when I reach my destination, I become my mother, unseen and lonely, piercing the heart of the donut to suck out the berry sweetness.

My final destination is as far as I can get from my family home. It is a structure all mine, a playhouse resting at the edge of the yard, complete with an inside lock so nothing can reach me unless I invite it in. It is, I’ll later learn, Woolf ’s “Room of One’s Own,” a space so entirely mine I write sprawling stories and sing as loudly as I can and paint watercolor murals on the wooden walls, watch the bright flowers drip and not mind because they are mine. I hang a poster of George Michael, a man whose music I barely know but whose magnetism is undeniable, even though my father groaned when he first saw it, muttering about queers under his breath. I sprawl in summer, feel the warmth across the floor and my legs, my whole being in sunlight. And in winter I listen to rain pelting the roof, feeling certain and steady in the knowledge that it will fall to the side of the pitched roof, gather in the gutters and away from me. Even when the world is flooding, I will be protected.

It only dawns on me years later that this safe haven was a smaller version of what I feared. Just as my dolls prepared me for my future role as mother, my playhouse prepared me for my future role as “Angel in the House,” that Victorian ideal that still hangs over women today. Virginia Woolf described the Angel in her 1931 speech “Professions for Women”: “She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She ex-celled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure.”

My playhouse was a two-story dream, with a real shingled roof and creamy lilac trim. There was a front stoop to sweep, a real carpet to vacuum, cupboards to fill with fake food and tiny dishes, and more dolls, who slept in this haven and always seemed angry and frightened that I’d been gone too long. There was no fleeing from the domestic space. Even with this life-size dream house, I was not a good-enough mother.

Woolf offers one suggestion for escape. “Killing the Angel in the House,” she wrote, “was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” So too the occupation of any woman looking to write a new story for herself, to map a course that leads her down a different path. But it is difficult to kill the angel when she is a version of you, when you construct her with the help of those you love. I helped my father build my playhouse, and he and my mother and I placed our handprints in the wet splooch of the cement foundation to mark the occasion. I knew the three of us existed always like that in the heart of my home. We were preserved, as in amber. Safe, glowing.

When the cement dried, we had a tea party, drinking cream-diluted coffee out of china doll cups no larger than a thimble. My father’s large hands eclipsed the cup, and as I sat by his side, my mother on his other side, I felt myself growing up. Still, even with spoons of sugar in my tiny cup of coffee, I gagged at the bitter taste. When it started to rain, we tried to dodge the drops, watched them fall in our cups, concentric rings widening out and out, like my mother’s stomach in the following months. It was an unspoken privilege and responsibility that the playhouse made me a big girl, a little mother. We sat together as long as we could while the storm built, the darkness creeping in, my newfound adulthood swirling around the bottom of my teacup.

The paint on my playhouse had scarcely dried and the tiny porthole window on the second floor was only recently installed when my new doll and new sister arrived. A new kitten too, for my parents must have sensed my unease. I named the kitten Teacup, after the blue mist of her eyes and that long-ago rainy day. She cried, as baby humans and animals do, but her mews mingled with the cries of my sister, and my parents insisted I put Teacup to bed in my playhouse each night. I cried too when I took her out each evening into the dark. My baby, I knew, was meant to be attached to my hip, my breast, held up in front of my very face. Still, I took her out alone in the dark and tucked her in a tiny bed. I sang her the songs I’d practiced with my dolls, songs my mother sang to my sister. Sometimes I sang songs about going home on country roads because my home did not feel my own anymore.

Each morning I’d wake and rush to the sliding glass door to look out at my playhouse. There through the morning mist was my tiny baby trapped atop the second floor, peering out the porthole window, her mouth wide in a panicked, silent cry.

When I run, I am gone only a few hours.

The sound of new sister crying, all need and take, a demand that pulses with her breath until her want seems inside of me, makes me leave. But the sound also makes me return: though I am frightened and overwhelmed by the constant demands—help Mommy change the diaper, help Mommy get the bottle, help Mommy watch the baby, help Mommy love this creature—I miss the baby as soon as I leave, and I creep home to beg forgiveness from the very thing I fled.

I am gone only as long as it takes to eat several donuts and regret the ache of too much sweetness. I am gone only as long as it takes to realize that the world does not much mind when a girl or a woman runs away because it knows she will always come back, silent and sheepish that she’d ever wanted more than was allowed.

No one comes after me. No one says anything when I return.

I slink home, my belly aching, my thighs scratched from my fall, ashamed I left, ashamed I am not worth enough to be missed. Ashamed, most of all, I failed. No sooner have I atoned for leaving my baby sister than I realize I’ve left my toy babies in my toy house.

I cannot tell the difference anymore, I realize, between work and play.

Read more from Issue 20.2.