Before I moved out of my parent’s house and into my first home with my new husband, I carefully wrapped my beloved Chatty Cathy doll, my Poor Pitiful Pearl doll, and an assortment of Barbie and Ken dolls in a protective layer of tissue paper, then placed them inside a sturdy box which I promptly sealed shut with packing tape. The dolls had no financial worth, but they represented endless hours of childhood happiness and I looked forward to the day in the future when I would lovingly hand them down to my daughters and/or granddaughters.
My husband and I had always planned on having three children, and our first two, both boys, were born less than three years apart. But when the time came to consider adding a third child to the mix, we were short on energy (boys will be…well…crazed lunatics), and long on debt (I was a stay-at-home mom). While I would have loved to have had a daughter, I knew there were no guarantees that baby number three would be a girl. My husband scheduled a vasectomy.
Once I turned 40 though, I seriously began to lament the fact that I didn’t have a daughter. I felt it when my sisters, each blessed with a daughter apiece, headed off for a girls’ day out filled with mani/pedis and the latest chick flick at the neighborhood theater. I felt it when my closest friend, blessed with not one, but two beautiful daughters, spent her weekend shopping for pink leotards and ballet slippers, while I shopped for jock straps and football cleats.
I felt it when one of my sons got engaged, and my future daughter-in-law scored the perfect dress for her mother in under a minute, while I trudged from store to store by myself, relying on the opinion of salesclerks. And I felt it years later, just days after my daughter-in-law gave birth to my one and only grandchild, a boy named Henry who is the love of my life. Having climbed the stairs of my son and daughter-in-law’s house to put away Henry’s laundry, I was greeted by a closed door, a signal that I was not welcome inside. I knew my daughter-in-law was nursing her baby and sharing the very special moment with her mother. I knew it was a moment I’d never share with anyone.
Perhaps the hardest daughterless-mother-moment came for me when my mother-in-law was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s and I realized there are things a son should never have to do for his mother. Who, I wondered, would get me dressed each day, take me to the bathroom and wipe my butt, or pluck the nasty black hairs cropping up on my chin when I could no longer do those things for myself?
I thought about the carton of dolls I had long ago packed away so lovingly, now having languished untouched in our garage for more than 44 years. Where I had once dreamed of them finding a loving home with my daughters or granddaughters, I now knew there was something less idealistic in store for them. After my death, I imagined my boys coming across the box while cleaning out the garage. One or the other of them would open it, peek inside and call out, “It’s just dolls,” before unceremoniously tossing the whole carton into the pile for Goodwill.
Only one person in my family has lived beyond the age of 80 and that was my grandmother, who like my mother-in-law, spent the last years of her life in an Alzheimer’s-induced fog. I’ll be turning 67 this year, and I know in a decade or two, my care and feeding will likely become my sons’ responsibility. I hold out hope that I’ll get lucky in the months before I die, and one of my sweet nieces, or maybe one of my girlfriend’s lovely daughters, will step in to spare my sons their awkwardness and help me maintain some dignity when I can no longer maintain it for myself. Should that be the case, my beloved doll collection is all theirs.
