The Final Chapter on How Barbie Saved My Life

A story that should be a heist movie... let me know if you want to collaborate

Hello August friends! I’m told everyone is checked out and has short attention spans for the month of August. I feel no difference, and I’m not sure that’s a compliment.

If you are new to this and the Parenting is a Joke podcast, welcome! We have a back catalog of 40 episodes for you to check out. On each show, I interview a standup comic about their life and how they are doing it while raising a kid or kids. And guess what career choice is wildly incompatible with having a child? Standup comedy! What’s that, you say? Almost every career in America is incompatible because of a lack of support, community, social structures, and working hours?

Well, you might be on to something there.

We will be back with a brand new season on Tuesday, September 19th - new episodes will drop every Tuesday after that, so subscribe to the podcast! This substack will continue throughout with personal essays, jokes, and musings on parenting.

With all the Barbie chatter in the air, I decided to share a personal story from my childhood on the impact the Barbie universe had on me. And no, I have not seen the movie yet…why? - my nights are filled with standup shows, or I want to be home with my family so… zero time right now! It also might have to do with this story.

I loved playing with Barbies as a little girl, and then at 8 years old, I was in a terrible car accident and almost died. While I was in the hospital my father promised to buy me the Barbie Dreamhouse when I got home, as a way to give my 8-year-old little self something to live for, something to look forward to.

In the fall of 2019, my mother died at 90. I went home to help sort through her house, take what I wanted. And that’s when I also found.. my Barbie Dreamhouse.

If you want to take a minute and read the prior two substacks to get the full story - you can do that here and here.

Here is the conclusion: (and a random photo of me at age 8)

It was in its original box, all taken apart, but apparently in perfect condition. I took a deep breath and sat on the cement furnace room floor—the Barbie Dreamhouse. I had played with that thing for years. Probably longer than a kid should play with a dollhouse. Its bright pink, orange, and yellow plastic was soaked with meaning. 

Here it was. And here I was. And again, I didn’t remember it being so big. What was I going to do with this thing? There was so much feeling going through me, my past loss, my current loss, and items that reminded me of happiness in between it all. And that Barbie Dreamhouse wasn’t valuable – it was just a collection of molded plastic from the 80s. But I couldn’t just garage-sale it. I definitely did not want to spend hundreds, maybe more, shipping it to New York and renting a storage space to keep it in.

I procrastinated dealing with it until the last day I was in Calgary and asked, actually begged, my brother to pick it up in his truck and keep it in his basement until I could figure out a storage space in Calgary for it. He seemed to agree. So at least I planned to delay figuring out what to do with this weighted item.

I flew back to New York with a suitcase full of ornaments, framed photos, a crystal butter dish, and matching candy dish that I carried on my lap on the flight home. I just tightly clutched it the whole 5-hour flight.

A week later, my sister called me in New York to tell me that my brother had forgotten to pick up the Barbie Dreamhouse box, and since we’d missed the deadline, it was now part of the estate sale, and there was nothing we could do about it.

I’ve never yelled at my older sister, but this did it. I was even surprised as at the level of anger that flooded out of me. I told her that we had to do something and someone had to say to that woman at Helping Hands that she just could not sell that item. My sister kept telling me that she could do nothing; she signed the contract, and “it was just stuff.” Then she said that I could buy it back at the estate sale. I was furious but also felt it was useless to continue this conversation, so I hung up on her and planned to never talk to her again.

I steamed and stewed all day. That night I was going with my husband to see a modern dance performance - a package of dance and theater tickets we had purchased a while back. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t know what else to do. 

Sitting in the audience of that dance performance was transformative. It was a troupe from Norway, and the dance piece was a theatrical story with love and heartbreak, but the style of all of the dancers can only be described as - they moved as if they were Barbies - stiff, with big sweeping movements, long leg strides, arms that were stuck in angled positions. And as I watched, I decided that Dreamhouse once saved my life, and now I had to save it, and I would do whatever I could to get it back, even if it meant buying it back. I wrote an email in my head during the show that I would type up and send to the woman at Helping Hands - even though I wasn’t allowed to contact her via this dumb contract.  

Here’s the exact words:

Hi,

I know that my Barbie Dreamhouse toy with all the furniture was left behind at my deceased mom’s house due to some confusion.

The reason I wanted that held for me is because it’s more than a toy I played with. I was unfortunately in a terrible car accident when I was 8 years old. My brother survived, my mom survived, and I survived. I was the worst off of the living with a collapsed lung, ruptured spleen, broken ribs, and a lacerated liver. My best friend, who was also in the car, did not make it.

In the hospital, somewhere between the ICU unit and the children’s ward, my dad told me he would buy me anything I wanted. I chose the Barbie Dreamhouse. At the time, as a kid, I thought he was just buying me a present. In hindsight, I understand that he was not only trying to give me a reason to live and something to look forward to, but I imagine the devastation of a child dying, my friend, was beyond overwhelming, and everyone was reaching to find something, anything nice to do.

That Barbie Dreamhouse, that object, is the only positive memory I have of that time, a time I continue to unpack and deal with 40 years later. I played with that Barbie house every day for years. Probably a couple of years too long.

It means so much to me that I hope you can see it fit to look past the mistake of it not being picked up and moved by my brother.

I remember you said that you like selling things with stories. This is the one item that has a story that I just can’t sell. That plastic dollhouse meant so much to the 8-year-old girl I was, and still to the woman I am. I can’t give my consent to sell it. 

Sincerely,
Ophira Eisenberg

She responded, “Please remove me from your list.”

Just kidding. No, she actually wrote back that she had never received an email like this and that my brother could pick up the Dreamhouse at his convenience. Sometimes signed contracts don’t mean a thing. 

So where is it now?Itt was too big and expensive to ship to New York, so a friend offered to store it in their business’s warehouse in Calgary. When I brought it there and hoisted it onto a top shelf in that massive space, it felt a little like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

I still don’t know exactly what to do with it, but it’s still important to me that it’s there. I can escape into again, any time.