What I Learned As A Mommy, From A Broken Doll
I just spent the last twenty minutes putting a doll back together. Cherry is her name. It’s one of the Madame Alexander dolls like I grew up not playing with. You remember the small ones jointed by rubber bands, right? As a girl, mine sat on top of my dresser. Germany and Spain. That’s where they were from, of course. Germany wore a black tuffet hat and a traditional peasant shawl. Spain had the prettiest flower headpiece and an embroidered gown that I just loved. I dusted around them each week, playing with them a little bit but remembering that they weren’t really to be played with. They weren’t that kind of doll. So there they sat, and there they sit now. Still in my childhood bedroom at my parent’s house.
Not much has changed there or here with the Madame Alexander dolls. Isabella knows that that doll in particular isn’t really one that we play with. She likes to hold it and asks often for her father or I to take it off of her dresser for a hug and a kiss. So we let her. It’s a little treat, and then Cherry goes back. Back on the dresser. So you can understand my surprise as I found Cherry in pieces tucked underneath the sheets in my bed just a little while after we put Isabella to bed earlier tonight.
I knew I could fix it. Well, me and a hair pin and a paperclip, that is. Mommy can fix anything! Sometime between the doll’s head popping off and getting everything back on I started to think of more than just this doll. I wish she had just come to me and asked me to fix it. Maybe we could have done it together, teaching her to be a little handier like her mommy in the process. Did she really have to hide it from me? (Well not so cleverly hidden on my side of the bed, but you know what I mean!) I don’t want Isabella and Camilla to feel that they have to hide their mistakes from me, and especially when they need help to fix those mistakes! It wasn’t a broken doll for me. It was realizing that because of my rigidity, my little girl couldn’t really come to me with her problems. She knows I’ll just get mad and tell her she shouldn’t have done what she did. Sorry, but *DUH!!* She knows she shouldn’t have done what she did at that point. The mistake was made and she didn’t know how to fix it, so she hid it from me. Right now it’s broken dolls, but later it could be more important things. I don’t want to be that kind of mommy or friend. My husband and I always tell her that she’s out best friend and she says it back, but we need to be a little more best friend-ly I think. You can tell your friends things, you know.
So I’m starting a new tradition with the Madame Alexander dolls starting tomorrow morning. No more dolls you can’t really play with. You’re all fair game now, so watch out my pretties! All dolls are meant to be played with from this day on at Chez Bellaziza. Oh and something else, we’re going to rescue the other dolls at Gram and Grampy’s house too. There’s Hansel and Gretel, the Bride and Groom, Cinderella who even lives in a glass house to keep her really pretty (COME ON!!) and of course Germany and Spain! I think that Madame Alexander would definitely approve, and as a mom these little dolls are teaching me a valuable lesson. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her about freeing the dolls!
How about you? Have you ever learned so much from a broken doll? Was it a truck perhaps? I’d love to hear!
Crista
