Here's to you, Barbie

Dear Barbie,
I've been thinking about you quite a bit since yesterday morning. I noticed, over coffee, that it was your birthday. I know we've never been close, but I've been meaning to write to you since. Sorry this is late. Happy belated birthday, Barbie.

I have to say, there have been times when I have hated you. There seemed to me, in the black and white way of categorizing the world that is habitual of youth, that there were two kinds of girls: Barbie girls and non-Barbie girls. Barbie girls, for one, had lots of Barbies and seemed to enjoy playing with them at length. They had Barbie accessories: the Corvette, the pink house. They often seemed irritatingly nonchalant about their riches, carrying an air about them that seemed to say, Of course I have the Corvette. Don’t you? Of course I have the dollhouse. Of course I had to get the Cheerleader outfits. Of course I love clothes; I love shopping. Don’t you?

I didn’t. I had somehow missed the boat when it came to you. For the first ten years of my life, I didn’t really pay you any mind.

Frankly, I had better things to do. There were trees to climb, and obstacle courses that I once engineered, just for fun. In the winter I constructed igloos for the purpose of seing what it what it was like to climb inside, even if I had to shimmy on my stomach, to be surrounded by snow. I played inventor. How had Edison done it? I wondered. I needed my own lightbulb moment; I needed an idea. Surely there was one coming to me, with so much still undiscovered. I rose early on Saturday mornings and constructed pulley systems in the basement. I carried a notepad and waited for my eureka moment to strike.

I had a few. I wrote them down. I wrote poems and plays. I preferred musicals, and these could be performed on holidays, when the family gathered, presumably in need of entertainment. I made invitations, tickets, a menu ("Tonight's special is orange juice and vanilla jello - on the house - Enjoy!”). Time went on; I didn’t notice it. I lived inside my own world.

Then one day, in summer, I had a eureka moment that I had never anticipated. I suppose that’s the thing about such moments; they seem to come from nowhere. It happened in the summer, about a month before the start of my sixth grade year. I had just turned eleven.

At the start of the season, I did not consider myself too old to play my favorite game at the local pool. It involved jumping into the water over and over again, at the deep end. Once submerged, I would spread my arms and hover at midpoint. Then, push off forward slightly with the balls of my feet, and glide. I was flying; the world around me muted; it was a living dream. When I ran out of air, I had to surface. Only then would I climb out, turn around, jump in again. Uninterrupted, I might have done this for hours, with the focus of a yogi master. We are the playthings of the gods, Plato has said, and for this reason, play is the most serious of human endeavors. I knew that then, but it was about to end.

Before the sun reached its midday zenith, I surfaced. I climbed out as usual, only mildly aware of the way that the elastic of my suit pulled against my belly. I had always been an athlete; I had always raced the boys. I had not spent much time considering that the value of my body might be measured by its proportions. A change was coming.

There were two girls: both conventially pretty, with freckles, long hair, and friendship bracelets; their fashionable bathing suits bagged a bit accross their tiny torsos. Each one had a noticeable indentation at their hip flexor. Such details would become significant to me only afterwards. I was emptying the excess water from my Cousteau-esque goggles, which I thought were wonderful because they let my eyes move about freely as I dove, and I could see the underwater world as if looking thourgh a pane of glass. I emptied quickly, and as I was preparing to turn around, I heard one whisper to the other, That girl looks like an alien.

I continued turning as if I hadn’t heard, walking to the edge; I jumped in. I remained underwater for as long as I could, even after the lack oxygen began to make my temples tingle. Slow, reluctant tears filled the insides of my now-hideous mask. I waited at the wall until they left. I got out of the pool, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat silently by my mother. There were no words for such an onslaught. What's wrong? She asked me. Nothing.

What have I missed? Something had been opened, suddenly. A grenade lobbed carelessly, a universe punctured and bleeding out. I ached to repair the damage caused by my lack of defenses. I grasped for answers and I considered the details: their slimness, their accessories, their trendy bracelets, the way they were playing rocks paper scissors on the pool deck because neither one wanted to go in first. Getting wet was to be avoided. Perhaps it was my shock, or my ignorance. Who knows? For whatever reason, I decided that it must have something to do with you, Barbie. I decided that all of those missed hours I had spent not playing with you, while I had been off doing other things that I had considered more important and more interesting, girls such as those had been studying up, and that this this label that I suddenly found myself wearing - Alien! - must have something to do with my distance from you.

Now, one does not start playing with Barbie at the age of eleven, and neither did I. But I did start to pay better attention. There was a code; I had missed it. I thought you were the key, or if not, at least symbolic of the missing link. Time to go about making sense of things. After all, I knew enough about you to know that eventually, the goal must be to have Ken, or someone like him, with which to ride around. I didn’t care whether the car was a Corvette, a bug, or a station wagon; I just didn’t want to be alone in it: outcast, loner, alien.

I resolved to do a few things differently in the fall. For starters, no more underwater diving. No more raising of my hand in class. No more plays. No more wearing of t-shirts I had painted myself. No more speaking in character at whim. The worst was finding new friends. My best friend, Tara, had long ago been branded class geek. I had known this for years; it was nothing new. But now the knowledge carried an ominous portent. If we remained friends, I might risk a lifetime of being alien. Tp prevent this from happening, I committed the greatest betrayal of my life. When she spoke to me, I sometimes pretended to be invisible, even though I wanted to ask her about her turtles. When she raised her hand, I wanted to raise mine, but sat on it instead. While she continued to earn A+’s and derisive comments, I deliberately put in wrong answers on spelling quizzes in order to earn C’s and the appropriate comments of, Hey I did better than you! from a boy in the back who smoked at recess and read books with pictures.

I spoke less, and listened more. I learned to doubt. Time went on. High school heartbreaks ensued. There was always a better girl: she was always there, always thinner, with better skin and hair and with the fashion sense I lacked. In college, I read widely. This was when I learned that women with advanced degrees had written books on you. They critiqued your waist, your heavy bosom; the way your proportions defied gravity. If she were alive, they said of you, she wouldn't be able to walk. I guess you were an alien, too.

They counted your faults: You only cared about how you looked. You could only be Doctor Barbie, or Army Ranger barbie, or Peace Corps Barbie, or Veterinarian Barbie, as long as you were still the Barbie that Ken couldn’t resist, with your irrational proportions and your forever smile. I don't think I ever saw a Postpartum Barbie. I don’t think Military Barbie ever took a beating or cried alone in her bunker. I don’t think Doctor Barbie ever got her hands dirty opening up cadavers or delivering babies. Plenty to critique here, and plenty did; only now do I think that this was futile. It was no better, really, than failing to recognize your power at all. We were all missing the point. Meanwhile, you smiled on; you always did.

Your power was at it’s zenith when you were in your box, new and shiny and still dressed, fastened at the back of your neck and at your wrists with plastic ties. Once you came out of the box, something happened; you did nothing. Wherever you were placed, you just sort of lay there.

I wondered where you came from, so I looked you up. I learned that you had been created by a mother, Ruth Handler, who had noticed her daughter, in play, giving adult roles to her infant dolls. Wouldn’t it be good to have a grown-up doll for her to play with? Ruth had wondered. She found your predecessor in Germany; she brought three back, and took one to Mattel headquarters. Soon afterwards, you were born. Ruth named you after her daughter, Barbara. The company branded you a teen fashion doll, but to Ruth you were also meant to be a talisman for the kind of play that her daughter seemed to want: the trying on of adult roles,as she imagined herself a woman. Here, Ruth had said. Here is a perfect adult woman. And so you were, Barbie: impossibly beautiful, like any worthwhile dream. There you were: a nurse, a teacher, a secretary, a firefighter. On and on and on, and never a frown or a line in your skin.

To be honest, I thought I had forgotten about you until I ran across a list of notable dates in the month of March. March 9 was your day. I almost missed it, Barbie. Just as I almost missed the point. You were not insignificant, nor were you a source of the rift that almost swallowed the girl I used to be, before I started to worry about what Ken would think. You didn't separate me from my best friend. You were only a doll: a gift from a mother to a daughter; a gift from one woman to many girls. You were plastic wrapped in plastic, but we wanted you to be a woman. At the very least, we wanted you to be a symbol: of something just out of reach. We let you stand for what we couldn’t grasp. You became what we wanted you to be: a nurturer of a daughter’s grown up dreams of what it would be like to be a woman. You became a witch when we learned that our womanhood had been bought with the dreams of our childhood. You became a scapegoat for the inevitable loss that ensued with the Faustian bargain we had so tacitly agreed to, with smiles just like yours.

Oh, Barbie. What could you do? What did you ever do, but stand there, held up in your shiny box, looking out through the window as we gazed upon you? What did you ever do, but lay there when we took you out, your permanent smile aiming at the ceiling beneath your perky eyes, as if to quip, Well? What did you expect? What now?

I have to go. My daughter needs a bath. She is still too young to know who you are. I don’t intend to tell her. Still, I suppose she will ask. And I could say, No. I could try to find another doll, or better yet - a worthwhile game, and ask, How about this, instead? Or, I could ask, Which Barbie? and let her play. After all, if play is the most serious thing we do, perhaps we make a mockery of it when we take it as seriously as ourselves.

I’m not having cake, by the way. You’re probably not either; you never were much of an eater. Still, I’ll toast to you. Happy fifty-first, Barbie. I hope that you're not insulted that no one seems to be making much of this particular birthday, which must seem pretty anti-climactic in light of all the fanfare that seemed to surround your fiftieth. You must understand, we are symbolic creatures, and fiftieth is silver, and silver anniversaries are emblematic: they carry a weight and a significance that goes beyond the number of their years.

I suspect that you know all about that. Or rather, I like to think that you do.

Photo provided by bugeaters on flickr, under a Creative Commons license.