On a handful of Christmases and birthdays, my mother gave me a fancy doll with a porcelain head, sausage curls, and a soft body dressed in nineteenth-century garb. These mass-produced dolls were not exactly high-class but cost as much as two or three cartons of Marlboro Lights, no small sacrifice in our parts. Mom presented the frilly effigies as items that I should cherish.
While I never wanted such things and quietly disliked them, I suspect that my mother admired the dolls’ rosy cheeks and ruffly Victorian dresses in authentic ways. She genuinely relished and excelled at the tasks associated with traditional domestic femininity—baking, decorating, applying mascara, wearing high heels, being an object of desire. It is not unlikely that she herself once wished for such a porcelain little girl in a household even poorer than ours.
Meanwhile, she openly hated the presence of the living, breathing little girl whose childhood had interrupted hers. While shaming and wild verbal rage were routine, and while spanking and an occasional slap in the face are hardly worth mentioning about a 1980s household, worst was the absence of hugs, kind looks, or loving moments that I imagine soften the sting of other parents’ failings. The dolls she gave me were a lot like her, pretty but not inviting touch; I remember her holding me just once during my entire upbringing, after I received the female rite of ear piercing at the mall when I was five.
Occasionally at night, after being tucked into bed by my father—whose own self-absorption engendered negligence but few outbursts and whose affection, while typically blurred by whiskey or stress, I sometimes could feel—I slipped back out of my bedroom, stood anxiously in the hallway until I found my courage, and entered the edge of the living room, where my mother sat, to plainly ask whether she loved me. Embedded in the question was not a manipulation but an honest accusation. I knew that she was supposed to. She would become uncomfortable and say, “Of course I love you,” with an eye roll. I would return to my bed in the same emotional agony that propelled me from it, mitigated some by having expressed myself in the situation.
While survivors often recall perceiving abuse and neglect as normal, I took note of the contrast between my domestic situation and that of other children. Once, Dad and I pulled up to a trailer home, and my friend emerged to climb into our work truck. While we were pals in kindergarten class, she drove me nuts staying at our house. After she and I shared a bubble bath in my mother’s large tub, she cried as I dried myself off and tied a towel around my body. She didn’t know how, she said. Similar situations were common. When adults weren’t around, other children were always crying and saying they didn’t know how to do what I was doing—prepare food, find their way home, get the mail.
My absence of parental care was revealed again and again until, instead of presuming myself unlovable, I assessed myself to be unloved. While more accurate, I cannot say the latter feels any better. I did not, of course, have the maturity or knowledge to understand that some adults are incapable of feeling or expressing love, such that the rejection still felt entirely personal; I was good and lovable, I felt, but the person who mattered most couldn’t see it. A sunny child by nature, I found outlets in school and books, nature and animals. Nonetheless, alone at night in my severe circumstances, I sometimes longed to die.
My most pitiful memory, around age seven, is of taking a steak knife from the kitchen and sitting on my bed with the knife pointed at my chest. I don’t think I considered killing myself; the true aim was that my mother would walk in, see, and suddenly awaken to my goodness. I held the knife so long that my small arms ached. It was bedtime, but no one entered, not even my dad. I returned the knife to the drawer and tucked myself in under the gaze of the Victorian dolls.
When my mother did welcome my presence, usually it was for my exploitation: to massage her feet, help clean the house, confirm that she looked beautiful in a photograph. While she might have received a mental health diagnosis, were we of a class and culture with ready access to health care, more important in my view is that her aversion to intimacy surely related to her own profound childhood trauma. More important still, looking back: she was just seventeen when I materialized in her womb. Indeed, her cruelty toward me dissipated with age as a dangerous fog burns off by midday.
Environmental effects go only so far in explaining personality, though. I myself never developed into an abusive or narcissistic person. Nor did my mother’s mother, who had the saddest origin story among us. I occasionally heard that my mother’s nature showed traces of her biological father, whose violence my grandmother fled to save her life years before I was born. In the end, who knows why cycles of human behavior begin, continue, and end.
The cycle I was born into involved such emotional desperation that I appreciated a collection of Victorian dolls merely because my mother had given them to me, which implied attention—never mind that giving them to a girl who plainly coveted her brother’s toys further confirmed that she perceived or validated little about my real self.
That self was beaming through all the while, plain to see now in orange-tinged photographs: On Christmas morning gazing at my little brother’s gray trench coat and matching Sherlock Holmes hat with envy. Outside developing a very accurate arm with a baseball, a football. Looking stricken after my brother received another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure for his birthday. Dapper in a button-up shirt tucked into navy slacks and a maroon clip-on tie for—hilariously—my first day of Catholic Sunday school. I was a cisgender, heterosexual girl who sought adventure and comfort. These virtues tended to manifest in the boys’ section. Perhaps, for all my mother’s femininity, I’d also internalized a negative association with being female; both of my parents plainly favored my brother, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time.
While my dad performed some domestic duties that relatively few men did at the time—combing my hair before school, changing my brother’s diapers—he was absent in ways that, true to his generation, placed most of the onus on my mother to do the nurturing for which she was so badly equipped. Had either parent looked, they would have seen me spending hours sketching on yellow legal pads, their blue lines blurred and puckered where an adult’s wet glass of instant iced tea had been set for lack of a coaster, with whatever sorry ballpoint pen or crusty pencil I could find in the junk drawer. I bestowed my objectively impressive drawings upon any adult present, leaving no question about my talent. Surely the welcome gift of art supplies would have been permissible along gender lines.
Yet the doll-giving persisted, indicating not just sexism but one of its many enablers: lazy disregard.
I am not speaking here of the inattention common to parents of previous generations; being left untended suited my independent personality where today’s hyper-managed and uber-tracked childhood would have oppressed. Rather, I am talking about being simultaneously unloved and unseen, and the way in which these experiences often intertwine.
Real love requires true attention—seeing another being for what they are, rather than casting upon them projections of our own pain. This love holds the power to remove not just the selfish veils that harm domestic relationships but the ancient, disastrous veils of the world: stereotypes, hateful prejudice, ugly cartoons.
Being female, a child in rural poverty, and the daughter of at least one narcissist, the frustration of being unseen, and by extension misunderstood, haunted me from a young age. What my treatment at home and in society suggested I was—a burden, redneck spawn, even an apt recipient of dolls in lacy dresses—felt to me so plainly incorrect as to cause anguish, for my child self intuitively knew that to love truly is to look closely.
Had the early life been less grim, perhaps the dolls I received would have seemed benign. Instead, they came to represent the fracture between my inner reality and an external realm tireless in its refusal to reflect my authentic self back to me. Even my cool grandmother Betty, capable of vast empathy and herself never one for prissy things, got in on the action. One Christmas, she gave me a Victorian doll from Kmart. When I was visibly disappointed despite my best efforts, she declared me spoiled.
That was the fifth and last Victorian doll I received, but the overall imposition of girly affects didn’t falter—ruffled dresses in my closet, ruffled pillows in my proverbial pink bedroom. For many birthdays to come, I continued to receive another sort of doll: the Enesco Growing Up Girls.
The Growing Up Girls porcelain figurine set ranged from a newborn in a basket, less than a couple inches high, to a sixteen-year-old perhaps half a foot tall. Each wore a pastel dress and bore the number of the age being celebrated—a gold “1” or “3” adorned a skirt the little girl wore, a “6” marked the cover of a book the little girl held, a “12” rested on a ribboned hat. I handled these hard, fragile shapes carefully, knowing I’d catch hell should one of them break.
The blond figurines, while no more my style than the Victorian dolls, appealed for having a clear function—tracking time and growth—and for the commitment my otherwise unreliable mother maintained in their annual purchase.
I took this small collection of figurines with me when, just after I turned eleven in the summer of 1991, I moved out of my mother’s home and into my grandmother’s. While Grandma never could bring herself to speak the reason, loving her grown daughter as she did, she surely took me in because I told her about my conditions at home. She acted like she didn’t believe me when I said Mom had called me a bitch, but then she went quiet; soon I was packing my things. There was no objection, to my knowledge, from my mother.
The Kmart doll incident notwithstanding, Grandma Betty was unfussy and sympathetic in ways a girl of eleven will notice. Where my mother found confidence in pantyhose, Grandma hated nothing more than senseless discomfort. When my mom gave me one unnecessary “training bra” made completely of itchy lace, Grandma shook her head. Despite Mom’s objections, my whole life Grandma had been cutting the tags out of my clothes because they irritated my sensitive skin.
After moving out of her house, I often spent weekends and summers with my mom, who seemed relieved by the lightened responsibility but continued to claim me as a dependent for tax purposes, a point my generous grandmother never raised.
The arrangement lifted a weight from my shoulders too. Largely freed from my mother’s dysfunction even as a biological longing for her persisted, I rode my skateboard with glee across the rough Wichita neighborhood where Grandma owned a little house. I climbed the tree next to the driveway, pretending it was my ship, I a captain charting the seas. At a yard sale, when my strange child heart ached at the sight of a yellow manual typewriter from the 1960s, Grandma pulled out her change purse; she later swiped some letterhead from the county courthouse where she worked, and my self-proclaimed career as a writer began.
In early 1992, when I was in sixth grade, Grandma sold the little house. We moved to her and my grandfather’s farm, where life only got sweeter. Cats birthed kittens in barns. Vegetables emerged from the garden, and butter went onto the griddle. I qualified for the regional math contest and won medals in track. Grandma and Grandpa threw legendary beer parties. I popped wheelies with our all-terrain vehicle in cow pastures.
In seventh grade, I changed schools and enjoyed a new popularity, a different slumber party every weekend. I collected baseball cards and enraged a male teacher by knowing the answer to an obscure sports trivia question that stumped every boy in class. Besides my long hair, I was androgynous in a forest-green plaid flannel vest over my denim shirt, and Grandma couldn’t have cared less.
My halcyon days in the early nineties—the “tween” years, no longer a little girl but not yet a teenager—left such a happy mark on me that through adulthood I would sometimes play a song or wear a fashion from that time to evoke the lightness I felt then. When the year turned to 2011, on New Year’s Eve I even had a very specific “early nineties” costume party, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of my favorite moment. To be eleven again or even twelve!
Social scientists and storytellers have declared this preteen era of childhood the most awkward and unpleasant phase of development. That truism never resonated for me. I didn’t start my period until I was just shy of thirteen; this fact, along with the improvement in my home life, meant that I enjoyed the liberations of late childhood without the confusing encroachment of womanhood and its objectifications. As the dolls once signified the pain of being unseen, age eleven came to signify for me the joy of seeing myself.
During my teenage years, as savage irony would have it, the mother incapable of loving me in childhood turned out to be my only family member who could relate to the woman I was becoming. Unlike the rest of my clan, she was a reader, an artist, a woman of words. More fundamentally, we each possessed an organic paganism that my practical, no-nonsense grandmother did not. Mom perceived the world as a matrix of “vibes” and dressed like Stevie Nicks. I communicated directly with the natural world and found emotional satisfaction in funerals, rare events where adults cut the crap and showed their feelings. When I stayed at her house, in the evening we pored over the same astrology books, and in the morning we split the newspaper.
There were, too, as I came of age, remarkable physical similarities between my mother and me. She had brown hair and eyes, and mine are blond and green; she was an inch taller. That’s about where the outward differences between us ended. Our looking shockingly alike, combined with our relatively small difference in age, meant that by the time I was a teenager we endured male attention at the same time and in the same way.
Once when I was in high school, as I sat in the passenger seat of her car at a stoplight, I sensed motion to my right. In the lane next to us, a middle-aged man had hoisted his pelvis toward his car’s window and was yanking on his penis. It was not clear which one of us he meant to share this with. I turned forward and didn’t tell my mom, figuring I’d spare us both the embarrassment.
Another time, she told me that a group of teenage boys had driven up in the lane next to her on a thoroughfare and raised a sign that read, “Show us your titties.” Enraged, she had followed them down the next exit ramp, which we both knew probably only thrilled them.
While her self-centered impulses persisted, often to damaging effect for me, as I entered adulthood I found our points of connection worth preserving. Amid her new drinking problem and my new life at college and beyond, I learned to protect myself from her worst tendencies. Over the years—and not without torment and grief—I accepted that, contrary to cultural insistence otherwise, not every mother’s love is a precious and unsurpassed thing.
We were more like sisters, maybe, anyway. There was no one with whom I’d rather discuss dark novels, the occult, period fashion, artists of the early twentieth century.
As my experiences with womanhood mounted, our shared knowing about sexism deepened. If at work my intelligence went underestimated or my presence in a meeting full of men was deemed an erotic danger, she required no explanation and extended total solidarity. Once, when I was in my early thirties and she was approaching fifty, I fretted over whether wearing a pair of red heels to work meant I was part of the problem.
“Wear the heels and take whatever it gets you,” she said. “They’ll call you a slut either way.”
I realized cautiously that we were becoming friends.
Soon after her fiftieth birthday, Mom called to tell me she had been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive breast cancer.
Concurrent with my mother’s mortal crisis was a series of disintegrations in my own life. I had just ended a fifteen-year relationship (and two-year marriage) with my high school sweetheart. A few months after Mom’s diagnosis, I resigned from a recently tenured professorship; soon, the lack of income necessitated selling my house and most of my belongings. I found myself stripped of nearly every identity and security I had built at the precise, destabilizing moment of a parent’s terminal illness.
While that life-altering moment hurt, it also cleansed. I experienced no less than what some cultures refer to as a shamanic death. A longtime people pleaser reborn to my inner guide, in that moment I was untamed and honest in ways the civilized world frowns upon.
Before heading west to my mother’s place in Denver, to help her husband and my grandmother—still vibrant in her sixties—with caregiving, I held an epic garage sale in Kansas.
The items up for purchase related to not just the “For Sale” sign in the yard but my clear state of mind. Coming from a family with tendencies toward clutter, a comfort for many of those scarred by scarcity, I found freedom in shedding material things big and small. I even got rid of most of my books, trusting the titles would find their way back to me if I needed to hold them again. I kept what was necessary for living. I kept a few things that were particularly meaningful or sentimental. I kept nothing, however, out of obligation, not even to the mother whose love I could now feel.
I will not claim it was easy when I pulled the Growing Up Girls and the Victorian dolls out of storage boxes and marked them with price tags. I will not claim I didn’t feel guilt as a blade in my heart, considering the dolls’ significance to my cancer-ridden, much-improved-with-age mother. But I was ready to let go of whatever held me down, including the defining discomfort of my childhood that the dolls symbolized.
On her better days during the illness, in her home filled with books about sun signs, moon signs, and reincarnation, my mother loved for me to read her tarot. She was inclined to look for predictions, but I told her that the cards themselves held no power. Rather, they were tools for discerning the truth she herself knew, right then, in the flow of energy currents leading to probable outcomes that she might have the ability to alter. In fact, as she was the seeker of the reading, her presence determined its content—both literally, because I invited her to pull the cards from the deck I spread before her, and in ways that after many years with my deck I can only describe as inexplicable.
“The deck doesn’t predict the future,” I told her. “The cards are just mass-produced slips of cardboard. We are making space for you and your intuition to have an intentional dialogue.”
I explained the meaning of each card and its position and guided her in relating these to her instincts. Sometimes a card’s significance would be immediately clear. Even if a card struck her as confusing or wrong, though, her resistance to its meaning was itself instructive. Where she readily connected some current situation to the card’s symbolism, she could find her truth mirrored back to her. Where she didn’t, she could find her truth in contrast.
Mom seemed slightly disappointed by my self-taught, light-handed approach, which dictated few explicit answers and perhaps thus felt less mystical. She was thrilled to learn, then, when I shuffled the deck and a single card shot out before I asked her to touch the deck, that in the art of tarot such cards are called “jumpers.” The jumper was itself part of the reading, all the more significant for whatever force had asserted it—her own astral vibration? The holy spirit? Hell if I knew, but I’d witnessed enough to acknowledge that jumpers were frequently uncanny in their relevance to the seeker.
So it was that, while my bodily memory sometimes buzzed with anxiety in her presence regardless of my spirit’s forgiveness, through her three-year illness we enjoyed each other’s company—watching home-improvement shows, digging through vintage leather bags at thrift shops, even carousing at the bars together between her treatments.
Once, after last call, we went through a late-night drive-through about ten minutes before closing. We were sensitive to our timing; we had both worked plenty of jobs tending customers until closing time, the approach of which becomes a time of prayer that no one will walk through the door.
When I rolled down my window to place our order, Mom leaned over from the passenger seat.
“We’ll take one thousand burritos,” she demanded. “And make it snappy.”
She then did an impression of the beleaguered teenager in a visor and headset whom we both were picturing. We laughed so hard we shook.
During that period, I spread for my mother the tarot more times than I can recall, cherishing our unique connection in the process. She had no degrees and, prior to her diagnosis, made a living in various sorts of sales, trading heavily on her clever charm; I had several degrees and got paid for my earnest ideas. But there was no doubt we were cut from the same witch’s cloak.
After one tarot reading, Mom told me she intended to leave her common-law husband. I gave her a necklace adorned with an image of the Hindu goddess Kali. A Punjabi-American friend had given it to me in recent times, when I was divorcing and ending many things, and declared that Kali’s honorable wrath—ruthless, necessary, unapologetic destruction and clearing—was with me.
Now, I told my mother as I handed her the necklace, it’s with you.
Mom did move out of the Denver place she shared with her husband, for a time. Eventually, she moved back and stayed in the relationship. I don’t know her reasons. I do know that she was fighting for her life, and that such a moment leaves little energy for other conflicts.
Throughout her illness, Mom understandably took whatever modern medicine offered. There were radiations and chemotherapy and surgeries, of course, all of which involved side effects and stressful bills. There were well-intentioned doctors and kind nurses. In many ways, though, her body became a source of profit whose nearing death was strategically ignored by the medical industrial complex. Sometimes this meant damaging overtreatment; sometimes, being denied treatment altogether.
Once, Aetna rejected a claim the hospital submitted for a new chemotherapy medication. Her scheduled treatment was thus delayed while we fought insurance to pay for it.
My mother was, as I understood it from her oncologist, the first known patient in the world to be diagnosed with both triple-negative breast cancer, the cells of which are fueled differently than most cancers and are harder to target with available treatment methods, and the then newly discovered PALB2 genetic mutation, which increases breast cancer risk. Leveraging this potentially newsworthy aspect of her treatment, I wrote an email not to the claims department but to Aetna’s head of national media relations seeking their perspective on refusal of her time-sensitive care.
The claim was approved three days later.
Despite this small success, bigger problems lay ahead; later that year, the cancer moved to her brain. Before the emergency surgery, I pressed the neurosurgeon to explain the potential side effects.
“Will it affect her words?” I asked him.
He said that it shouldn’t, that’s a different area of the brain. He suggested that she might die soon without the surgery, which at least created some chance. Of what, I was never sure.
Hours later, when the neurosurgeon finally approached Grandma and me in the waiting room, we stood up. My mom’s husband must have been in the recovery room with her, though I don’t remember for certain.
“Her brain was just full of cancer,” the surgeon said. “Like noodles spilling all over her brain.”
I looked at Grandma to make sure she wasn’t falling down. The unusual order of death, in generational terms, meant not just supporting my mother as she died but supporting my grandmother—my second mother, really—as she experienced the most dreaded of losses.
After Mom recovered from the surgery, she struggled with brain fog and accomplishing certain tasks. She seemed changed—calmer and more relaxed, which cannot be considered tragic. But she was also the same enough, for a time, her words sufficient.
The broader treatment process—do not, my mother once warned in a Facebook post, call cancer a fucking journey—contained some moments of beauty. Once, a hospital technician pushed in an ultrasound machine; a moment later, I saw my mother’s heart on a screen. There it was, contracting, expanding, going on heroically. Mom was not moved, but I watched the screen with tears in my eyes—something like the inverse of a pregnant woman watching her baby’s heartbeat in a sonogram.
One might imagine the unsuccessful brain surgery was a turning point toward discussions about mortality. However, the doctors went on with their experiments and proposed treatments. Within months, her pelvis and upper leg bones were riddled with cancer, her skeleton degenerating beneath her flesh. To my amazement, her doctor recommended putting a rod in her femur. Death? the doctor seemed to say as she looked past its obvious presence on my mother’s face. What death?
Before the femur surgery, a hospital orderly showed up to take Mom to an MRI. I followed as he pushed her wheelchair through the hospital’s corridors, down to what I recall as a basement imaging area. I waited outside.
Afterward, Mom appeared out of sorts, wide-eyed and disturbed. As I sometimes did, I pushed her wheelchair back to her room myself.
“He watched me,” she said quietly.
“What?” I asked.
“That guy who took me down there,” she said. “He watched me undress and put on the hospital gown. He didn’t leave the room.”
With Mom’s blessing, I made calls within the hospital; I filed a complaint and raised hell. The hospital assured me that the orderly had been fired. I learned he had tried to reenter the building without his security clearance, which had been removed.
Soon, Mom’s husband called my cell phone and yelled at me to stay out of it. I was causing problems that might threaten her treatment, he said, and if her quality of care decreased it would be my fault.
It was unclear whether he believed my mother’s story, which she seemed to have told solely to me, but whether the event had transpired might have been irrelevant to him. It was reasonable, I admit, to worry that medical attention to prolong survival might be deprioritized if a patient with grievances were deemed a legal liability. It was reasonable, too, for the spouse who would receive the medical bills to resent the meddling of an adult child.
Nonetheless, I refused to ignore what others might consider trivial. My mother, whose early traumas I had studied thoroughly in order to heal myself, had been devalued throughout her life for inhabiting a female body, at times a female body in economic poverty. It seemed that, for different reasons and in different ways, her treatment in death would be no better.
Soon, they wheeled her off again. This time they pushed a metal shaft into her thigh and sewed her back up.
I spent that week in her hospital room while she winced in pain despite all manner of drugs. Perhaps the femur surgery was worth that misery in ways I do not understand. Two certain beneficiaries, however, were the hospital and the health insurance company.
A violent operation on a dying body is a refusal to see the truth, in order that profitable power structures be maintained. It is in this way the opposite of love. We have created entire systems of deliberate unseeing, to excruciating effect.
One afternoon in early autumn, grief swelled in my chest. My mother had died less than a week prior in Colorado, and Grandma and I were back in Kansas. That last nine-hour trip east along I-70, I had driven the truck with Grandma in the passenger seat and Mom’s ashes in the extended cab. All that remained in Denver was a houseful of my mother’s belongings to be dealt with later. As when I was eleven, I had moved in with my grandmother.
The grief seemed unbearable. But I was in my mid-thirties and had learned about middle-class pursuits called self-care and emotional regulation. Instead of ignoring or numbing a difficult feeling, as generations of my family had done, I decided to go for a walk.
When the wind came out of the northwest, awful smells from the nearby pet-food plant settled over the working-class neighborhood where Grandma now lived; Grandpa was long dead, the farm long sold. Despite the factory odor, I appreciated her house’s location near the city limits, where I could cross the street to a quiet country lane that tapered into overgrown ditches.
That late-September day, I stepped into the sunlight and headed north. I took a deep breath. I noted the spot where I had stopped to watch a baby snapping turtle the previous spring. Another step. Another breath.
Her death was a relief, I admitted to myself—for her because she suffered, and for her husband, Grandma, and me because caregiving can be a devastating exhaustion.
How unlikely that we became great friends in her later years, I thought. Above me, oak leaves brushed each other in the breeze. Another breath, another step.
Guilt turned my stomach as I recalled a moment in the kitchen several months prior. I had become frustrated with her and Grandma and, in a rare moment of assertion among them, raised my voice.
“We don’t communicate!” I yelled.
Instead of twisting her face into a look of disgust, as she would have done in her younger days, she replied humbly.
“Teach us how,” she said, her wide eyes begging.
Nothing has ever ripped my heart out more completely than this proof of the decent core within the monster of my childhood.
Step, step, step. I heard the pebbles grind into the road beneath my sneakers as my mind returned to just a few nights prior, when I sat next to the medical bed that Hospice had set up in her dining room. She couldn’t make it up the stairs in those final days. The Hospice nurse had left, thinking Mom still had a week. Mom’s body thought otherwise. There were drugs in her system, but she was coherent. Something led me to hold her bony hand for hours through the night, into the early morning, while her weary husband and mother slept nearby.
Step, step, step. Breath, breath, breath. I was nearing the end of my walk and could see Grandma’s house.
Death, I thought, is the most transcendent—
A young man’s voice behind me interrupted my reverie.
“LOOK AT THE ASS ON THAT THING!!!”
A car rolled past, turned onto our street, and pulled into the driveway directly across from ours. I realized that the young man hanging out the car window was our neighbor’s twenty-something son. I had never met him, but he sometimes leered while I pushed Grandma’s lawn mower.
My feet stopped. My breath slowed, and my eyes stopped blinking. I stood in the sun, my cheeks wet from the tears of my cathartic walk. Within me rose a composed rage, prismatic as a rainbow over a grave. As I watched the laughing young men get out of the car, the primal force inside me wished only to destroy them.
I knew, though, that their limited vision for seeing me as a woman related to someone else’s limited vision for seeing them as men, probably when they were little boys, possibly wishing for dolls.
On a winter night, in my early forties and contemplating the approaching end of my reproductive years, I realized that I was aging into a freedom that I had not experienced since before puberty. My perceived worth and threat as a sexual object would wane; likely it already had, but I cared so little that I hadn’t noticed. I was fortunate, by then, to be valued for my voice, to make a good living with my creativity.
Beyond my gender, as a White woman no other means of erasure remained; society’s disregard for its elders would find me, if I lived to old age, but for the moment I had outlasted familiar means of objectification, diminishment, or discrimination. I was no longer poor, I was able-bodied, and every intimate who ever refused to acknowledge my value was dead or divorced from my life.
This new reality evoked memories of age eleven, when I moved out of an abusive home and came into myself. Now, though, I was an adult with real agency and means—even better than those righteous tween years after dolls and before breasts. Eleven—but better! I thought. Perhaps I’d get out my vests and Bonnie Raitt tape and party like it was 1991.
That same cold night at midlife, I sat in my home office sorting through my mother’s considerable family photo collection, which I’d finally found time to process more than seven years since her death. For months, I had been throwing away bad photos and organizing the ones worth keeping. I discarded mercilessly, as I once had discarded dolls. In the room with me were the singed metal rod from Mom’s femur surgery, given alongside her ashes by the crematorium, and the Kali necklace, which had returned to my stead when I sorted her jewelry box.
As I filed a photo behind an index card labeled with the appropriate year, from the tub of old pictures yet to be sorted another photo somehow fell on its own accord—leaped, really, it seemed. I looked up, startled.
As I picked up this jumper of a photo, my skin raised into goose bumps. I’d never seen it before, that I could recall.
It was a picture of me, tan and sun-bleached on my eleventh birthday, cupping in my hands a Growing Up Girl. The small, porcelain figurine wore a pale blue dress and held a cake topped with the gold numeral “11.” My facial expression conveyed that I was amused but not elated by the annual gift. This isn’t my thing, my eyes said. This is not me.
Looking at the photo, my eyes welling, I had to laugh. What was the doll or any other insult but a tarot card of sorts, a symbol to be embraced or rejected, clarifying the self in either case? What was a mother but the same sort of mirror?
While we long to be understood and loved, and as we seek a just world in which all beings might be so appreciated, our first task is to see ourselves—a process, inevitably, of casting off the false descriptions that a deranged world provides. The dolls I once received were tools for revealing what I am: a defender of those whose sacredness goes unseen.