playing with dolls

As non-parents, are we still kids at heart?

Sue Fagalde Lick Chatty Cathy, childless, childless on Halloween, childless women playing with dolls, playing with dolls , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I was dressing my Chatty Cathy doll the other night when—

What? Are you surprised a 72-year-old woman is dressing a doll from the 1960s? Well, I was. She’s more of a vintage artifact these days, but she’s still with me, watching over my office from atop a tall storage cabinet. This was the doll who spoke when you pulled the string behind her neck, saying things like “I’m hungry” or “I love you.” Now she just says “aaaaarrrrgh.”

Unlike most of the dolls my family bought me, she wasn’t brown-eyed and black-haired like me. This girl’s a blue-eyed blonde, about eighteen inches tall, pudgy-kneed and rosy-cheeked. She’s one of the few my mother didn’t give away when she decided I was too old to play with dolls.

I have an authentic Chatty Cathy storage chest loaded with clothing for all seasons and all occasions. We bought some official Chatty Cathy outfits, but my mother made most of her extensive wardrobe one summer while I was away visiting my grandparents on the coast. She must have sewed night and day on my grandmother’s old treadle-powered machine to make so many little dresses, pants, aprons, hats, and coats in such a short time. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I still treasure them, along with the letter she wrote to me, talking about what she and Dad were up to and how much she missed me.

Photo shows a vintage Chatty Cathy doll, blonde and blue-eyed, wearing a red and black plaid coat and a matching cap.

Back to 2024. Here on the Oregon coast, the rainy season has begun, and Chatty Cathy was wearing only a thin summer dress. As I put on her red flannel coat and hat, slipping them over her plastic arms, I thought about how this was like dressing a child, the child I never had. I thought about how my mother would never get to make little dresses for a real daughter of mine. That daughter might play with my old dolls and destroy them. Or she might shun them for the newer dolls that are softer and do more things. Maybe she wouldn’t play with dolls at all.

My brother does have a daughter, but they lived at a distance, and Mom never got to spend much time with her. Cancer took my mother too soon for her to enjoy my brother’s three beautiful grandchildren.

If I had given birth on what was the expected schedule back in the 1970s, so much would have been different. By now, I might be the grandmother or even great-grandmother making or buying little garments and slipping them over pudgy arms and legs, talking to the little ones as I did it.

Did I talk to Chatty Cathy as I dressed her? Of course. I talk to tea kettles and slugs, pine trees and blue jays. I probably wouldn’t be talking to everything like a crazy person if I didn’t live alone, but as it turns out, I didn’t have children, and Chatty Cathy outlasted ten homes, two marriages, a divorce and widowhood. Tough doll, that one. So, I told her about how the weather folks were forecasting a cold, wet winter and she needed to dress warmly. She just blinked her eyes at me.

I often think I’m still able to play like a child because I didn’t have a child. I didn’t age through the generations the way mothers and fathers do. I’m a motherless and fatherless daughter with no one coming up behind me, just great-nieces and nephews off to the side. When I have the chance, not often enough, I’m happy to get down and play with them as if I weren’t the aged aunt.

Meanwhile, Halloween is this week. It can be difficult watching parents dress their little ones in costumes and take them out trick-or-treating. If we can’t hitch on to someone else’s kids, we don’t get to play this time.

Social media will be filled with pictures of children, babies, and maybe a few dogs and cats dressed as ghosts, witches, superheroes, or something else I don’t know about. If you can join in the fun somehow, go for it. If it hurts too much, stay off the Internet and go to the movies until all the kids are snug in their beds.

This week at my Substack, I talk about comparing our lives to other people’s lives. That certainly applies here, too. When we look at others having babies and doing things with their growing kids, we can feel left out and sad, even when we feel all right most of the time. It’s normal. Allow yourself to feel jealous for a little while, then shake it off and move on. Everyone has both hardships and blessings, whether they have children or don’t.

Meanwhile, if you still have your old dolls or other toys, you don’t have to share them. But don’t play with them in front of other grown-ups. They might not understand.

Do you feel younger than your peers because you don’t have children? Have you saved remnants of your childhood that you take out from time to time?

How are you dealing with Halloween?

Button up; it’s getting colder, and next week’s U.S. election is coming like a hurricane.

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“Barbie” doll leads the way for not-moms

Sue Fagalde Lick childless role models, Dame Helen Mirren, playing with dolls , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
A little girl dressed in pink stands inside a pink Barbie doll box surrounded by pink balloons.

I watched the Barbie movie again last week after Ryan Gosling rocked the “Ken” song on the Academy awards. I needed a night full of pink, woman power, and fun music. Barbie is one of us, you know. Never had kids. Most versions of Barbie never got married, and well, it’s difficult to make babies when you don’t have genitals.

I was also reminded of Barbie when I came across a chapter that didn’t make it into my Childless by Marriage book. It’s titled “I’d Rather Die Than Be Like My Mother.” Now, those are not my words. I was quoting someone else. I think my mother was fantastic. I did want to be like her. But let me share a little about Barbie and the other dolls from that missing chapter.

On the TV soup commercial, the little girl with pigtails tells us about her mother taking care of her big family, making sure everyone is healthy, happy and well-fed. “She’s supermom,” the girl says. “I want to grow up to be just like my mom.”

Click. Suddenly I realize what makes some little girls want to be mommies while others don’t want anything to do with motherhood. It’s role models. You want to emulate the people you admire. My mother was a great mom, so I grew up wanting to be one, too. I also wanted to be a writer like Grandma Rachel, and I wanted to be in show biz like all the people I saw on TV. My Barbie dolls were always singers going off to do a show, not mommies in the kitchen making dinner.

Interestingly, some of the women I interviewed said their Barbies were themselves or their friends. Others saw Barbie as an adult role model. Gina, an unmarried 42-year-old court reporter, says, “Barbie kicked ass and was a professional woman, not a wife and mother.” But Talia, who at 34 still hopes to find the right man and have children, confesses, “My dolls were all my babies. I’d even make my Barbie doll pregnant.”

Most of the women in my life were mothers. My grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and the other women who lived on our block were all mothers. The ladies on TV were mothers. Even those show business icons I admired were mothers or destined to become mothers once they met and married the man of their dreams. In the fairy tales I read, the hero and heroine got together and next thing you knew they had children.

It was even in the songs: “Tea for Two for two and two for tea, me for you and you for me. We will raise a family, a boy for you, a girl for me. Can’t you see how lovely it will be.”  

Babies were considered a good thing. When my Aunt Joyce gave birth to my cousins Tracy and Chris, it was great news. Everyone was happy. Babies were held out as a treasure. “Do you want to hold him?” the mothers would ask.

I didn’t spend too much time around babies growing up, unless you count all the dolls I treated like my children, but I was raised to believe that every little girl would grow up to be a mommy. Watching my mother modeling near-perfect motherhood every day of her life, I never questioned wanting to be a mother. Of course I wanted children.

At one point in the introduction to the Barbie movie, we see a group of little girls cuddling and caring for their baby dolls. All the little mothers look a little brainwashed. But then, Barbie arrives with the music from “2001” playing, and the little moms smash their baby dolls to bits.

That’s how much our world changed in the years when I was growing up. But the Barbie dolls of the movie were not content to be stereotypes with perfect figures and high heels on their forever tiptoed feet. They start to realize there’s more to life and they have the power to go after it. As for poor Ken, sorry.

I don’t want to dive into politics, but our world seems to be changing again with a large contingent of U.S. conservatives wanting to take away reproductive choices by outlawing abortion and more recently, declaring illegal some of the key aspects of fertility treatments. Are they trying to bring back the world where little girls spend all their time taking care of make-believe babies until they grow up expecting to raise real babies? Let’s look at the beginning of the movie again, just before Barbie arrives. There are five girls on the screen. Take the infant dolls away from two of them. Those girls are us, the ones who do not have babies.

I don’t know if there has ever been or will be a short, dumpy, gray-haired Barbie in a pink hoodie and jeans who is always reading or writing, but there might be. Writer Barbie! We are each free to be our own kind of kick-ass Barbie, mother or not. As non-mom narrator Helen Mirren says in the movie, “Because Barbie can be free to be anything, women can be free to be anything.” Bottom line, motherhood is the traditional choice, but it is not the only choice. If you still have your doll, raise her up high and vow to keep it that way.  

While you’re at it, read this fabulous poem by Denise Duhamel about Barbie facing Medicare. It was published on March 19 at the Rattle poetry site. Also take a look at The Barbie Diaries by my friend Dale Champlin , and Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang.

In fact, there are a lot of Barbie books. Clearly she is more than just a doll.

Photo by Criativa Pix Fotografia on Pexels.com

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Mommy Training with Dolls

Sue Fagalde Lick childless women playing with dolls, mommy training, playing with dolls

I once had a hundred dolls. I lined them up on my dresser and counted them. My math was probably off, but they were my children. Every year at Christmas, there seemed to be a new doll I just had to have. If Santa didn’t bring her, I’d die. One year Santa brought a three-foot-tall walking doll I named Patty. My friend Sherri got one, too. We walked them down the street toward each other so they could be best friends, just like us. My dolls always had dark hair and eyes like me. Sherri’s dolls were blondes.

Each new doll I received spent the first night sleeping against the pillow next to me while the others slept with the stuffed animals at the foot of the bed. It’s a wonder there was any room left for me. I named the newcomer, kissed her and wrapped my body around hers to protect her from the night terrors.

The next morning, I dressed her, combed her hair and brought her to breakfast with me, setting her up against the milk bottle, pretending to feed her bits of toast and eggs. I took her to school with me, never wanting to leave her alone. I knew she was just a cloth or plastic doll, but she was a real person to me.

Back in the 1950s, the big innovation was baby dolls that drank and wet. You inserted the tip of a rubber bottle in the hole between their lips and squeezed the milk or water down their throats. Rather quickly, the liquid came out a hole on the other end. It was too messy to do in the house.

Sherri and I fed our “babies” outside in the patio. That was our house. It never seemed odd to us to be two mothers sharing the same house. Our husbands were nonexistent or off at imaginary jobs where they belonged. Like our mothers, we spent our days taking care of the house and our babies. We talked to our dolls all the time, telling them how sweet they were and how much we loved them. We taught them what we had learned about Jesus in catechism class, along with the ABCs, the times tables, and the capitals of all the states in the U.S.

Betsy Wetsy and Tiny Tears led to Chatty Cathy, who could talk when you pulled the string in her back. “I’m hungry.” “I’m thirsty.” “I love you,” she said. Then we got Barbie and her curvaceous friends. My black-haired Barbie had a best friend named Sandy, and they hung out with Sherri’s blonde Barbie and Ken. We invented boyfriends and careers for our dolls. Mine were always in show business. Sherri’s Barbie was a stay-at-home mom.

We watched our children grow up in that redwood patio with the cracked concrete floor. We cooked our pretend meals in the brick fireplace that my father and grandfather had built together, and washed the dishes in the sink Dad had made from scraps of wood and old pipes.

I was a good mother to my dolls, but all too soon I faced the empty nest.

When I was around 13, growing breasts and having my first periods, my mother decided I didn’t need dolls anymore. “You’re getting too old,” she said. “It’s time to give them to Goodwill.

“No,” I protested. “They’re mine.” My children. How could I give them up?

Mom was not one for sentiment or saving things. Most of my dolls went away. I kept only a few, the ones Mom couldn’t find. My favorite, Chatty Cathy, sits on top of my bookshelf right now, looking down with a goofy smile. I change her outfits to match the seasons, choosing from a red and white trunk full of clothing. Chatty Cathy gargle-talks like an old lady who’s had a stroke. One of her shoulders is cracked so her arm falls off if I’m not careful. She doesn’t have any teeth. But I love her anyway.

Mom ditched my dolls as a sign it was time for me to grow up, date, get married, and have flesh-and-blood babies.

Well, I did part of that. The invisible husband became real, and every now and then I got to play mommy with my stepchildren—until their real mother showed up.

But I never had babies. A little girl with a doll is a mommy in training. I guess I was training for the wrong career.

How about you? Did you play with dolls? Did you consider yourself their mother?

Copyright 2011 Sue Fagalde Lick