What Barbie Means to Me

 

Hello, friends, it's been a while.  Wait, that's a song, isn't it?  Anyway.  I have to admit that not blogging has been a bit of a relief, at least not blogging about shows or food or work.  But I have to admit I've been thinking about restarting the blog with a new focus: my life dealing with aging parents.  I feel as if this is a frontier that no one can prepare you for and no one really talks about.  Though part of me feels as if I want to guard their privacy, part of me feels as if maybe I could help someone else by sharing the many MANY trials that go with having parents with dementia. The seat-of-your-pants planning, the guilt, the exhaustion, the research, the fear.  So...I don't know.  I'm still deciding if I want to blog about these sad adventures.  But I DO want to share something that happened recently and what it made me think about.  I thought about Tweeting (I refuse to call the platform X) this little story, but I became afraid of the comments.  I thought about putting it on Facebook, but I became afraid of someone sharing with my parents (one of whom is on Facebook under an alias).  But for some reason I really want to have this in print, who knows why?  So here we go.  

I've always had a bit of a meh relationship with Barbie, not because of any feminist or political leanings.  But because my first memory of Barbie is my aunt not letting me play with hers, lol.  She was always really protective of her stuff and wouldn't let me touch them.  Eventually, my mom bought a couple for me and my sister, plus the camper and other Barbieworld things, and we had a good time.  Playing with Barbies may have been my first attempt at theater, we would make up stories and drag them out for hours.  Maybe I should've become a playwright after all!  But honestly, I guess my feelings were so kind of hurt, that's my main takeaway.  The photo at the right shows a time I snuck one of her dolls away.  It didn't last long, lol.

That brings me to the recent movie.  I had kind of avoided it, though I found all of the commentary on it fascinating.  I read all of the think pieces and enjoyed hearing about its success.  My sister and I talked about taking our mom over the summer, but it never happened.  When it premiered on cable, one night I was scrolling through the cable guide and found it.  Mom said, let's watch!  So we did.

Mom can't really concentrate on movies anymore that she hasn't already seen (though a lot of movies she's already seen are new to her, sadly) and irony and subtext and satire just go over her head.  So she was pretty restless and unengaged throughout much of the movie, though she stayed and watched relatively respectfully because she heard me laughing and enjoying myself.  She got up and wandered around the house a little in the middle of the movie, but she happened to be standing near the tv when America Ferrera performed 'the monologue.'  If you've seen the movie, you know the one I mean.  Mom sat back down and listened and when it was over, Mom yelled "YES.  THAT'S EXACTLY HOW IT IS."

I was stunned.  I cried.  I'm crying now.  I never really thought about my mom as a woman before, I guess.  I know the story of how my dad saw Mom through a window one day and decided she was the one for him.  They dated for two years, got married, had me and my sister, and Mom was a stay-at-home mom.  It's only lately that I've discovered that Mom never really liked to cook, that she wanted to go to college after high school, that she sometimes feels she hasn't accomplished anything other than raising two good people.  I frequently rail against the patriarchy but never thought about how it affected my mom.  It breaks my heart that such a good person feels as if she hasn't accomplished anything.  That she has felt like she's not enough.  Now I understand her teaching me to read at four.  Now I understand her urging me to be my own person and go to college.  There was more than just wanting her kids to do more than she did.  It was an acknowledgement that she was likely KEPT from doing what she wanted to do and she fought for that not to happen to me.

Some days, Mom isn't quite sure who we are to each other - are we sisters?  Am I the mom?  What does being the mom mean?  It's all jumbled in her brain.  Dementia is the absolute worst.  And it's ironic that the woman who urged me to have my own life now needs me to subsume mine into hers.  It isn't done maliciously or knowingly, but she expects me to take care of her.  I'm working through that; hearing Mom be so vehemently understanding about how women can be held down while sort of watching a movie about Barbie is making me rethink a few things.  How far can I do to be what my mom expected me to be before dementia took over?  So I guess having Barbie ambivalence made the movie a different experience for me, and is making me examine lives in ways I didn't expect.