What Barbie Taught Me About Trying to Fit In
Thoughts on plastic and human parts
Seeing the Barbie movie sparked a memory of my first Barbie doll, which was also the first toy I paid for with my own money — that is, money I’d saved out of my allowance, birthday checks, and Chanukah gelt. My Barbie had the classic proportions that, as my mother pointed out, would make any living woman topple over. But when my parents told me I could buy whatever I wanted, no other toy came to mind. My friends had Barbies, and I wanted one too.
My father drove me to the toy store. Maybe that’s why the purchase was memorable. Mother time streamed by, punctuated by moods — hers and mine — that hung around like stubborn weather systems. But Dad time was an event. I was on my best behavior because I knew he would rather be doing other things. Of course, my mother had things she too would rather have been doing than driving me to the dentist, or clothes shopping or — especially — shoe shopping, which was always painful. I had wide square feet that didn’t fit into the styles my friends wore. It took forever to settle on a pair that fit but weren’t too ugly, with the discarded options arrayed around us in boxes lined with tissue paper. My mother complained that she did all the hard stuff and my father got outsized credit for the few tasks he picked up. For me he was sort of like Ryan…
