When My Mother Gave Away My Barbie Dolls

I was twelve years old and nearing the end of sixth grade when I walked home from school, up the stairs, into my bedroom, and opened my closet door to a puzzling sight. All my Barbie dolls, their wardrobe cases, their home, car, swimming pool, camper, and airplane were GONE!

I remembered we were moving to another town in about a month, so I guessed my mother had begun packing my stuff already. I went back downstairs to ask her, “Hey, where are all my Barbies and Barbie stuff?”

Her face said, “Just listen and shut up about it.”

Her mouth said, “OK, I’ve decided you are too old for all that stuff now. You hardly ever play with it anymore, right? I’m not moving all that stuff to another house. I gave it all away to Goodwill.”

I don’t remember how long my stunned silence lasted.

She had never told me of this plan. She never asked me if it was alright with me if she gave my dolls and doll accessories away.

In the past, she had occasionally asked me and my younger sister to gather our old toys to give away, which we didn’t mind because we got to choose what to part with. We felt good about making some needy children happy.

But this was so unexpected, abrupt, and cruel, even for my mother who liked to say she was “no Carol Brady.”

My mother had been closer to my sister than to me for as long as I could remember, probably because of their shared love of horses and ballet.

My sister would sometimes “play Barbies” with me during our childhoods, as we were only seventeen months apart in age, but she was never passionate about it.

She had to be extremely bored to play Barbies, so all of them, even the ones she got for Christmas and birthdays, ended up in my bedroom closet. Her room was filled with plastic horses and horse books.

But I played Barbies like no one else I knew.

I was surprised when I saw the neighborhood girls playing Barbies in the most boring way I could imagine. They literally just dressed them in outfits, brushed the hair, and then changed the outfits and changed the hair. THAT’S IT!

I had never played Barbies like that, even when I was in preschool!

Maybe it’s because my dad was a theatrical director and my mother a former actress. Maybe it came from my early obsession with television. Whatever influenced it, my Barbies acted out stories.

They were dramatic or comical plays, movies, and, most often, TV sitcoms. My Barbie and Ken were usually the parents, with Skippers (mine and my sister’s) and other dolls as the happy family living in my Barbie Dream House.

My Barbies were not actually the characters in these shows, but actors, with their own names and personalities different from those of the characters they played. They had rehearsals in their everyday clothes before they put on their costumes for the final production.

There was the camping show, featuring the Barbie camper, the show where Barbie gets a job as a stewardess (not a “flight attendant” in the 1970s), the swimming lesson show in our backyard where I was allowed to fill the Barbie pool with real water, and, more often than I’d like to admit, wedding shows.

Actually, I don’t remember if the weddings were shows or “real” weddings. But aren’t all real wedding shows anyway? I loved to dress the Barbies for a big wedding, complete with ceremony, reception, and going to the newlyweds’ house where they would — well, I didn’t know what brides and grooms did after that. Wait for a baby, I guessed.

Another thing I didn’t know back then was I was not merely playing with my dolls. I was writing. I was a showrunner by age seven.

What my mother didn’t know, or pretended not to know, was that by the time I was twelve, the Barbie shows went on. I never mentioned this to my sixth-grade friends or to my fifth-grade sister.

By this time, my sister had her own bedroom down the hall from mine. I had a small black and white TV in my room, which was usually blaring shows like Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, and also, because I was almost a teenager, more sophisticated fare like Taxi and WKRP in Cincinnati.

As the shows drowned out the sound of me setting up my Barbie house and putting the cast in costumes, the stories they acted were more emotionally complex now.

Teenagers ran away from home or looked for part-time jobs. Parents fought and considered divorce. If I was in a happier mood, they did big numbers in a movie musical. I had seen both “That’s Entertainment” movies and had fallen in love with Gene Kelly.

But now, that upsetting afternoon, it was over.

The cast, the sets, the costumes, all gone. Their next owners wouldn’t know how many stories these dolls had made come to life since I got my first Barbie from my grandmother when I was four.

I couldn’t think how to articulate my feelings about this to my ultra-practical mother.

My tiny cast had acted their hearts out as characters who had been kidnapped, gotten deathly ill, injured in car and plane crashes, and pushed on stage to fill in for the star of the show who broke her leg.

What would they do now?

What would I do now?

Here’s what I did. I began to write stories, plays, and eventually short films for my human high school friends to act in.

After I became an adult and married, my little daughter and I combined the art forms of playing with dolls and filmmaking whenever we were bored.

I still have the movies in which my daughter’s dolls were the actors. I never gave away a single one of her dolls or doll accessories without her permission.

I wonder what my Barbie dolls are doing now.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This story was originally published on Medium.com.