Barbie Saved My Live part 2

so I had to save hers

Hello everyone!

YES!! The intense Barbie-related titles continue as I post the rest of this story. But first - we celebrate our final episode of Parenting is a Joke Season 1 with a comedy couple - Joe List and Sarah Tollemache, who are expecting their first child in mere months. Joe, Sarah, and I connect on how great it is to have a kid later in life - you’ve done your partying, and now have a valid excuse to get out of everything! They also talk about their fertility journey, hopes of touring with a baby in tow, and how DNA has nothing to do with love. You can hear it HERE.

We will be returning with a New Season of Parenting is a Joke on Sept 18th, so subscribe now to the podcast, and you can subscribe to this substack so you don’t miss any news/content/episode announcements!

And now BACK to my story about how getting a Barbie Dreamhouse as a gift from my dad after surviving a near-fatal car accident may have saved my life….

If you missed last week’s substack - you can read it here to get that story.

After the car accident, I played with my Barbie Dreamhouse every day. That is not an exaggeration. I would get up 30 minutes earlier than I needed to for school and play with my Barbies. I’d play with them after school. I had intricate storylines I can’t quite remember although I do seem to recall I made Barbie a magazine writer and created tiny magazines with paper, markers, and tape for her desk. 

I played with that Dreamhouse longer than all of my friends. Maybe it was even play therapy… before any of us knew those kinds of terms.

Fun fact - those plastic flowers for the outside planters came in a series of sealed plastic bags - and one of them had a dead cockroach in it. Because I lived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, I didn’t know what it was. But my father, from Israel, thought it was rather small.

In October 2019,  I returned home for 4 days of a grueling task. My mother had passed away the month before. She was 90 years old, and I was there with her, along with my sister and brother, when she died. After the funeral, we sat Shiva at my mom’s house, on her furniture, surrounded by all her stuff and, frankly, a lot of our stuff. Actually, it was many lifetimes of stuff that included 6 kid’s-worth of baby books, photos, report cards, drawings, and memories. Being the youngest and having lived in that house more than any of my older siblings, there was a lot of my stuff in the basement of that house and it was clear that I had to deal with it.

We decided to hire an estate seller to deal with most of the contents – the furniture, the dishes, and my mom’s beautiful clothes that she kept in perfect shape. The woman we went with was from a company called Helping Hands. She looked like someone who had organized a lot of church bake sales in the past, was very soft-spoken and more tepid than warm as she was clearly a business person. She slowly walked through my mother’s house assessing what was of value, what might fetch a good price. Above settling on the percentage that she would take from each item that sold, she was clear about the strict terms: she would only deal with one person from our family as her contact, and that person would need to sign a contract, and that contract included one very important non-negotiable point: Anything left in the house after October 23^rd would be considered part of the sale, no exceptions.

To me, that seemed like a very strange thing to ask, but then with just a tiny bit of reflection, it started to make sense. Every item in my mother’s house pulled at a string in my soul. The now half-broken brass rose that my sister gave her for her 60^th birthday, the crystal candy dish that became a home for every small toy I had as a kid. The only thing that stopped me from taking all of it was that I lived in a tiny apartment in New York. I would take a few things, but there was no way I could transport or store the reupholstered living chair that I wanted or the old set of Encyclopedia Britannica that I constantly scoured through as a kid. My sister, on the other hand, appeared to have little interest in taking anything. I wondered if it was because it would unleash the storm of sadness and longing that was locked up in her. So, she was self-nominated as the exclusive family member who would communicate with the estate saleswoman.

Calgary seemed especially dark that week. Like there was no sunlight at any hour. I know this can’t be true, but that’s what I remember of it. I got up and had a silent green tea with my brother. That was his ritual, so I just went with it. I love my brother, but I call him (in my head) a cathode-ray tube TV because he’s slow to warm up. Eventually, he does, and it’s very colorful and entertaining, but you have to be patient.

I went to Staples and bought a pile of boxes, packing tape, and bubble wrap – I didn’t even know what I was wrapping or boxing exactly, but the act of preparing for it made me feel like I was in control. My mother’s house was freezing. I turned up the heat and opened her drawers to find her clothes all perfectly folded and neat, like she was coming home tomorrow. I borrowed a warm long-sleeved sweatshirt. I supposed it was mine to keep, but I remember thinking I was borrowing it. I made some more tea in one of my favorite Corningware mugs that were from a full set of dishes we used every day growing up. Thousands of meals were served in those. They really held up. I sipped my tea while looking out the kitchen window at her garden. My mother was pretty much good at everything, but her gardening was beyond. The snow lay on flowers that were still in bloom. I thought about how she would have been annoyed to see that.

Finally, I dragged myself downstairs to start sifting through many layers of the past, the past before I even was born. Of all the things I looked at – and there was something to look at everywhere - what stuck out to me were the dozens of magazines my mother kept including one from Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, a newspaper clipping from the Jewish Star that announced that I was the first Jewish baby born in Calgary of the year (I was born at 5 am on Jan 2^nd) and therefore my parents were awarded all of this free stuff including free gas for their car, free diapers, free groceries… I had never known about this happening. I asked my older sister about it. “Oh yeah, I remember that it was so irritating hearing about how great you were!” she teased. I also found that I wrote a lot of depressing poetry in grades 5 and 6 that I submitted as schoolwork in Language Arts class, and rereading it, I was surprised that no one ever talked to me or my parents about it. It seemed to me to be atypically obsessed with death but who knows? It wasn’t terribly unique - I believe a line was, “and on her last breath she wondered, did anyone care?” 

And then I found all of my Barbies. I loved Barbie. I had quite a few - a couple handed down from my older sister, who I loved because they had real eyelashes rather than painted ones. The one I liked the best was the one I bought with my own money called Pretty in Pink Barbie.

And there were so many Barbie clothes – beautiful outfits: gowns, coats, hats, all custom made by my mother, as she would sew for my Barbies from leftover material she had from making our clothing. My mother was an expert seamstress.

I don’t know exactly what came over me, but I looked up at the clock, and 3 hours had passed. In that time, I had just dressed all of my old Barbies up in these homemade outfits and sat them on a table in a sort of fashion-show tableau. I don’t know why I did it or how I did it for hours, but this was the closest to a meditation I think I will ever experience.

I left my room to look around in the furnace room for it, and saw tucked under the basement stairs was this trunk. This massive steamer trunk. It was too heavy to move easily. I turned around and grasped the side handle with my hands behind me to use my legs and thigh muscles to walk it out. I had no idea how my elderly mother had tucked it underneath there. I unlatched the two large brass enclosures on the front and lifted up the top like a treasure chest.

There inside it was my Barbie Dreamhouse.

Stay tuned for the shocking conclusion to this story next week!

Until then, check out the season closer of our podcast Parenting is a Joke with Joe List and Sarah Tollemache. AND if you’ve missed any episodes, 40 different episodes are waiting to entertain you with stellar comedian guests. Check them all out.

See you here next week for the continuation of my Barbie story!