And Just Like That

This week, on a beautiful false-spring Monday, the girls told me they want to put their American Girl dolls into storage and turn the “former AG room” in the finished basement into a “teen hangout.” “We’re not really into the AGs anymore,” Lucia explained. So blase. The dolls that have been their constant companions for four years are now to be packed away, their clothes and accessories tidied and placed in bins. Lucia visibly reacted to the image of the dolls in bins, and backtracked, saying no, instead she’ll dress them nicely and put them on a shelf.

Greta asked if we could store the dolls within reach, just in case they want to pull them out and play with them “for a few minutes.” The long hours and days of setting up schoolrooms and elaborate meals and carefully posed circles of all the dolls with their small plastic hands resting on one another’s shoulders--all of it is over. “For a few minutes”--like a secret. Like a glance backward. Like a quick reflection of girls they soon won’t even recognize.

I knew this was coming. I knew the end was in sight. I’m surprised, to be honest, that we made it this long. We stole a year thanks to the pandemic, an atypical year when their interactions with peers were minimal and their childhoods got a lucky chance to freeze along with the outside world. But as last summer wound down, the start of school--middle school--loomed. Playing with American Girl dolls was going to fall by the wayside, I predicted. And I was right. School started, and the tide turned. They haven’t so much as looked at their dolls in months.

After making their announcement, the girls ran off to find cool room ideas on Pinterest while I went down to the doll room, looked at the still, silent faces of the AGs, and cried. And just like that, their first life comes to an end.

I am not okay.

We talk a lot in this house about the Second Life. This isn’t anything religious, though a Second Life seems to me like something divine. A Second Life is a second chance for a beloved toy to live. Few toys receive it. Fewer still are granted a Second Life in which they are even more beloved than in the first. In my family, only Carmel Judy--my first and most beloved Cabbage Patch--has achieved this status. Carmel Judy spent decades in an old wooden doll crib in my parents’ attic, piled in with the other Cabbage Patches, her original shoes disintegrating over the years into a sticky chemical toxin. Her sewn fingers are frayed; her cloth arms are dirty and stained; her brown yarn hair is matted; her original white dress is gray and pilly. Yet there was something about her that drew Lucia to her about five years ago. Lucia plucked her from the crib during a visit to Connellsville, took her home with us to New Jersey, gave her a loud, relentlessly cheerful voice that’s just short of shrill.

Carmel Judy was alive again.

I say “alive” and mean, actually, alive. She may not walk or talk on her own (that we know of), but I truly believe this doll has a soul. She is real, as only the most beloved toys are, and even this hint of Velveteen Rabbit is enough to get me ugly-crying. I find that book unreadable, and I do not and cannot read it, indeed I donated my copy years ago, and the reason is this: the Velveteen Rabbit becomes a real rabbit when he can no longer be with the child; yet for all the adoration she receives, Carmel Judy will not take on agency and set off into a golden forest when Lucia no longer needs her. She’ll once again take her place in a box, or a bin, or some shelf in the attic, her Second Life ending just as did her first. Carmel Judy is as much a voice in our family as those of my actual children; but one day her shrill, happy voice will go silent. Not one of us will take any notice when she speaks for the final time. One day, she just won’t speak again.

I am undone by this thought.

In an almost unbearably wrenching essay titled “I Am the Tooth Fairy,” poet Sabrina Orah Mark writes about what it means as a mother to let the magic of childhood go, and who that magic was really for. “For whom is a child’s childhood?” she asks. “I think it’s for all of us. But it’s not for when we are children. Our childhoods are for later.” She wishes she could “draw a map that clearly marks where my sons’ wonder is buried so they always know where to go on their coldest days.” Later, she says: “If I were really the tooth fairy, I’d lay each tooth, like a body, on a rose leaf. I’d carry them one by one over my head through the streets. The air would brighten, and grow sad and sweet. And I would sing, though I cannot sing, a lament for everything I must remember and everything my sons must forget.”

Forgive me if I pause here to sob.

When we do clear out a storage area and put the dolls away this weekend, I will never forget those moments--but the girls will. I know this because I have no memory of relegating Carmel Judy to the attic all those decades ago. Life as a tween and teen is all forward motion; things are left behind, but it doesn’t really register, because it seems like all the good stuff is ahead. I didn’t think about Carmel Judy until I was thirty-eight years old, with a seven-year-old child who found and claimed her, and I’m sure my first thought was something along the lines of, Great; something else to clutter up the house.

Now I don’t want to leave her behind again. The American Girls are one thing; those were bought for the children, brand-new in red boxes, and they played with them and loved them and are setting them aside as they must. Those dolls will have their fallow time now, an expected and well-deserved rest. Such is the life of a doll. Maybe they’ll be lucky enough to get a Second Life one day; maybe they’ll simply be cherished heirlooms. No one knows.

But Carmel Judy? When her time comes, and the steward of her Second Life finally breaches the cusp of moving on, just as I did so many years ago? I can’t possibly let something this beloved go. Lucia and Greta are moving forward, shedding old versions of themselves like split snakeskins. They’ll soon leave behind more than just dolls; the storage room needs new shelving, new bins, to catch the precious detritus. I’ll pack it all safely away, all the artifacts of the childhood I created for them, which are also artifacts of who I’ve been as a mother of small children. But Carmel Judy will be far from the bins and boxes. Carmel Judy will be staying with me.

***Addendum: The American Girl dolls went into the closet today. Lucia and Greta spent time dressing them in their original outfits, right down to the shoes, slipping for the last time into their dolls' voices as the dolls discussed where they were going on their Big Trip. As though the dolls will carry on with their adventures; as though the doll world will continue operating just to the side of our actual life. There was giggling, there were proclamations of love between the dolls and their pets, there were pleased compliments over how nice they looked in their loved and familiar clothes, and then they were piled into the closet and it was the end.***