My first essay is inspired by Question #6: What do you remember most keenly about your childhood? When I was answering this question the other day, I realized I have a lot to say about it. Barbies were a big part of my childhood. One of my friends and I used to have the most elaborate games. As I was thinking about it, though, I realized that playing Barbies wasn't just something I did because it was fun. It allowed me to explore the world and the questions I had at an age when I was to young to explore them myself.
Below is a start to my essay. I have a general sense of the structure I want to follow for my essay. I still have a lot more to fill in and the middle is scattered. I was just trying to get ideas out. I'm not going to say anything more, though, because I want to get an objective opinion without too much of my backstory. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
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"Mom, can I say 'shit' when I'm playing with my Barbies?" I asked. I was five-years-old, and experimenting with the use of language. All kinds of language. I experimented with saying "I love you" to a boy other than my dad, "I hate you," to my brother. I soon learned that these simply were all words, without the emotion behind them. I was too young to know the power of "I love you." I hope I'm always too young to hate anyone. "Shit," I learned, along with other curse words, weren't as exciting as they sounded when the adults said them.
There were so many questions I had about the world that I was not yet old enough to figure out for myself. I used to have a lot of fears: war, someone peeking into my window, death. That is why I played Barbies. Sometimes I played alone, but usually I played with my friend. We played "House," sometimes, but it never entertained us for as long as "Barbies" did. By voicing the dolls, we ourselves did not have to be a part of the game, so we could explore those things and say those things that made us uneasy in real life. It wasn't really us saying it, after all.
Through Barbies, my friend and I explored our fears in ways that didn't make them seem so scary. I remember the doll-sized wooden barn my friend's grandfather built her for all her plastic horses. While all the Barbies were "sleeping" in the barn–which we converted to a loft room–we had one of the Ken dolls peak into the window before sneaking in to steal the snap-on boots and the laptop. I remember feeling slightly nervous during that moment, even though I was the one controlling the Ken doll and I knew it was just a game.
Although we both had extravagant wooden Barbie houses, sometimes we got bored and decided to change the scenery. One time we decided to play “poor Barbie,” and we built a house out of tissue boxes and dish cloths. My friend's mom said our Barbies were the richest poor Barbies she had ever seen. We liked the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies for awhile. During that phase we made 20-person families and took them on "road trips." Connecting every princess carriage and empty plastic bin we could find–it was a large family–to the pink Barbie RV, we made a car that stretched the length of my friend's bedroom. Of course, the car was too long to ever actually move, so we narrated the scenery as they drove across the country, and sometimes sprayed the RV windows with water if we wanted a change of weather.
When we got older, our games "matured" into Barbie Natural Disaster. Somehow whenever the earthquakes came, the mothers always had time to make a child sling out of a bandana. They somehow managed to carry three to four Kelly dolls at once, but they always say that in times of danger, it's amazing what adrenaline enables the body to do. The most popular disaster was the tsunami. We laid the Barbies on the bed and shook the blue comforter, shouting, "Tsunami!" Following the disaster would, of course, be Barbie Hospital.
Most memorably, however, I remember the day I sat down with my Barbies and could no longer make them speak.
