Duendesday: ‘doll-world’

{life with a curious and crazy 13 yr old}

Since she was a wee one, Duende has always made her own mind about her toys. We foster imaginative toys and we don’t buy plastic so she creates her own little worlds. She didn’t care for dolls when she was smaller, except a couple of stuffy dolls (Big Baby — who is a pillow doll, and a couple of gorgeous handcrafted fairy dolls from a friend of a friend who makes stunning sewn crafts) which she mostly just slept with but then all of a sudden, just when I thought she was getting too old for the doll world, she decided to start ‘saving’ Barbie’s from the Swap Shack (the re-use garage at the transfer station), and then she found porcelain dolls.

Mostly they act as props for her fashions — she loves to design fashions and they rarely do much else (though once in awhile the Barbie’s have been known to have dance parties in disco clubs), as she strips them of any previous clothing and sews new dresses, hats, shoes, etc. It amuses her and is a full design circle for her (from drawing, to sometimes a pattern, to sewing). And now, somehow she has quite a doll ‘collection’. I think it is a middle ground, a tiny grasp/hold onto childhood and yet an articulate move toward personhood. It still fuels her imagination, so we’re good with it.

My favorite story from long ago was from an amazing Goddard mentor of both J & I, who had 2 children. As a strong feminist, she was concerned her daughter would absorb too much dominant culture from her acquired Barbie but overheard the children playing one day, one with a dragon and one with the doll, and realized they would all be fine when the kids combined those two facets — the Barbie, after all, was always in drag.

Which then leads me to a great Patti Smith quote, “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag”. Isn’t it all costume, these personas we wear…underneath it all, we’re just people trying to relate to other people.

Here’s to cinnamon rolls as big as your head (thank you, B&T), secret diaries, learning cursive, Ted the tortoise, paper moustaches, and fashion as art.