The Doll Emancipation

I had a conversation with my sister via text a few days ago that brought back a peculiar memory. It transported me to a painful time, but it was a story I wanted to explore. It involves three sisters, three dolls in captivity, and my last symbolic act before I fled the house of my family and found my way to California.

It also involves my mother. Yes, I have already written so much about her, particularly during the last part of her life, when she was living in an assisted care facility in southern California. That’s because writing has always been a form of therapy for me, and it helped me to cope with the challenges of tending to her and to process the emotions. We had rescued her from New York, where she inhabited what has since entered the vernacular as a “hoarder house” — filled with stacks of newspapers, cardboard boxes, and a staggering accumulation of stuff, often piled like tall, precarious cliffs with narrow paths in between. Numerous cats roamed freely, by then her only friends, but these living creatures failed to buffer her against the loneliness that hovered everywhere, so heavy and palpable.

And yet it wasn’t easy, this rescue, nor did it feel kind at the time. The trauma was terrible and understandable. That old brick house had been her domain for decades, and its contents her only wealth. It was the house in which her kids grew up, the house in which our father died. The long avenue upon which it sat and the few stores at the corner were familiar to her, and maybe when she gazed out onto the unkempt yard, with its stolen grocery carts and cat food dishes and random junk heaps here and there, she saw not squalor but domesticity.

She walked everywhere at all hours, and she sometimes took a bus. A certain bus-driver––he happened to be an African-American man––came to recognize and pity her, and one day he invited her to join him and his family for Thanksgiving dinner. She told me about it: he picked her up in his own car and brought her to his home, then later drove her back and escorted her like a lady right to her door. I find his kindness and generosity breathtaking even now, and I wish I knew his name, but I imagine–-and hope—that a man so fine and decent would have known many blessings.

Anyway, this is what her days had become, and then we plucked her out, and so began her California life. It was a chapter launched with tears and hysteria, but it miraculously evolved into a fairly peaceable existence (until a cluster of calamities near the end) and I looked in on her as best I could for sixteen years, gradually breaking through my ambivalence and finding a kind of love beneath the pain.

And that’s why I haven’t talked so much about the way things used to be, before I began to recognize her courage and her spirit, before I learned to love her and forgive her for the chaos and fury she unleashed upon our family. We grew up amidst constant fights and melodrama, and in our minds she was the ruination of everything. But in the later years, it seemed prurient and disrespectful to dwell on her pathologies, for affection and empathy had reshaped my heart. We see so differently through the lens of compassion.

I also began belatedly to look at the person I was in those long-ago days and try to understand the motivations behind the actions that set in motion my life’s trajectory. I have always identified with Mary Oliver’s magnificent poem, The Journey, which begins:

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice --

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

And that’s what was happening forty years ago. As the house trembled and younger siblings cried for me to stay, I planned and executed an escape. I was determined to save my own life, although not at all certain that I could. But I returned to the house for a last look and what would suffice as a good-bye to my mother.

Things had not yet deteriorated to their eventual state, but closets were barricaded, sheets hung over bureau drawers, and various warnings were written on notes or in charcoal on the walls. We endured these strange parameters even in childhood. My mother would abscond with treasures, often toys and clothes that belonged to us, and put them away for safekeeping. If our curiosity and desire got the best of us and we dared to invade these inner sanctums, we were charged with the crime of “rummaging”, and the tirades that ensued were never worth it.

Now, on this last visit, I remembered that there were three dolls in an attic closet. They were impractical dolls, antique porcelain, stiff and musty. Someone my father had worked for had given them to him to bring home for his three daughters. We were delighted, but it wasn’t long before my mother took the dolls and entombed them in the off-limits closet, wrapped in cloths and concealed in cardboard boxes snugly taped shut.

And I don’t know what came over me on that last visit, but I was suddenly ten years old again, and defiant. I opened the barricaded closet, boldly rummaged, found the dolls, and retrieved them. I gave my sisters theirs and took my own, a straw-haired bride in a gauzy Miss Havisham wedding dress, all the way to California.

My mother believed I had committed a terrible betrayal, an unforgivable crime. Soon I was newly out West, staying with friends, not sure what I was going to do, worried and afraid. But she ranted in a letter about the seizure of those dolls as if nothing were more important. It only seemed to validate the righteousness of my deed.

I realize now that my mother felt isolated, overwhelmed, and abandoned, unable to see that she herself had driven us away. And I recognize the ruthlessness of mental illness. How different all our lives might have been if she’d had proper psychiatric care and medication, and if perhaps the overall circumstances had been easier.

Her light emerged in her later years. I glimpsed its flickers in her feisty resilience, her cheerfulness, her child-like pleasure in little things. I loved her. I wonder if she knew that.

And my own life turned out fine, as you can see––but when old dolls and sad stories come tugging at me, I cannot help but look back, trying to cull whatever wisdom and understanding can be harvested.

We all struggle with de-cluttering, and the tyranny of stuff. In the aforementioned text exchange, my sister told me that she was trying to finally streamline and get rid of things and was actually thinking about what she should do with her doll, the very doll I had emancipated for her. And that, of course, is what triggered the memory.

But it also triggered a long-overdue conversation with this sister about my role in the family, the way I left them all behind, and the self-inflicted flagellation that ensued. She said I had been her “sister-mother”, and I shuddered at the term. I told her that I knew she saw me that way, and that I was sorry it was a role I could not sustain. I continued to try, even while saving myself, and for many years thereafter, to do kind things for the others. But I knew it was never enough, and because of its insufficiency, I didn’t think it was recognized at all. I had simply failed to live up to expectations, and I felt forever judged and found wanting.

I was surprised, therefore, when my sister texted this:

I think we all did what we were capable of and for our survival. I’ll never forget all the times you rescued us from the scary fighting in that house. And the way you encouraged my love of reading. Or the times Daddy let me call you long distance and it made my day. I even have folders in that file cabinet that you labeled for me to help me make some order to my life at at an unimaginable time. None of that is forgotten or wasted. I really hope we can maintain our connection. Life is just too short.

I suddenly felt acknowledged and absolved.

And I realize that this post veers sharply into a personal realm, and there are those who may wonder why I choose to share things that are so private. But I believe there are universals in specificities, and there are glimmers of learning beneath our mistakes and pain, and maybe my honest sharing will make someone else feel less alone. Or maybe not, but I have staked out this space as a place of hope, connection, and earnest effort, and its borders are fluid, and so I tell these stories, and I like to think that they might find their way to other hearts. Even if not, the writing helps me to better understand what has transpired, and to discover things I’d missed .

Here is what I think: We must glean the gold from the jumble of the past. Revisiting with empathy can unearth a kind of tenderness, and there are overlooked surprises gleaming in the long procession of remembered events. We must not let sad endings negate the wonders that preceded them or blind us to the possibility of beautiful outcomes that may yet arise, and we must recognize that we are interconnected. If good ensues anywhere, it indirectly washes over all of us. And please don’t roll your eyes, but I mean it when I say that love is the miracle, in all its myriad forms.

So who knows? Maybe the emancipation of the three dolls retroactively freed something in me, all these decades later.

My friend Annie read this post and asked me if my doll had a name. The answer is no. I never even gave her a name. And I regret to report that she resides in a dusty, cobwebby box in a Gaviota garage. I brought her out a few days ago after all these many years, just so I could take the picture above. She smelled like history, like the yellowed pages of old books and letters, or the mustiness of moth-eaten garments, or an upstairs bedroom at dusk in the 19th century. It was such a distinct and disturbing smell, I could barely hold her, but I carried her into the daylight and sort of brushed her off in the fresh air. It was weirdly healing, but I still didn’t know what to do with her, and I promptly put her back. Her fate, alas, has not improved.