Her First Doll

My daughter got a doll for Christmas. Complicated feelings ensued.

For the second year in a row, traveling home for the holiday wasn't in the cards for us. Last year, it was the pandemic. This year, it was the baby.

Last year on Christmas Eve, we dressed our dog in a goofy antler hat and drove up to a neighborhood in Simi Valley that LAist said had good Christmas lights. We got Detroit-style pizza from a place in Thousand Oaks and ate it in the parking lot. Everything felt apocalyptic, so who the hell cared if we were using our pants for napkins? Then we went home, got drunk, and tried to sing the song "Heart & Soul" by T'Pau-- a song with surprisingly complicated lyrics. It was the first year of my entire life that I was not with my parents on Christmas Eve. Almost two months later to the day, I'd get a positive read on a pregnancy test.

We tried to make this year feel a little more normal, but with an 8-week-old baby, there is no normal. I learned the hard way that Juniper is too young to care about holiday lights; she spent the drive up to the Arcadia Holiday Lights Show screaming, which, to me, felt like my brain being zapped over and over, because evolution prioritizes the survival of offspring over the sanity of mothers. It was my mistake; I assumed that because she'd been calm on other car rides, that she'd be calm on this one. (If God is a woman, She is the kind of awful Girlboss type who believes that every other woman should be hazed the way she was, because it builds character and "she turned out fine.")

So instead of loading Juniper and all of her accoutrements into a car to the Grove for a photo of her purple-faced with confused rage on the lap of a wannabe actor dressed as Santa, we stayed home and opened gifts from the grandparents over FaceTime.

There is no demographic that receives more gifts and cares about them less than babies. I'm not condemning anybody who gives the baby a gift; I too have fallen prey to the mysterious siren song of the baby section; I cannot enter a Target not leave with at least one little thing for her-- a book, a toy, an outfit. Juniper has only just advanced to the stage where she's capable of sucking on her own hands. She doesn't need a tambourine shaped like a strawberry with two blueberry-shaped maracas. And yet, I could not stop myself.

One of the gifts my parents gave Juniper was a baby doll. (I believe that it matches the gift they got for their other granddaughter, my 2-year-old niece Cat whose primary interests are dolls and Minnie Mouse.) Juniper's doll smells like baby powder and has eyes that shut when she is set down on her back, an extremely unrealistic feature for the doll analog of a human baby. When Juniper is old enough to do more than put her hands in her mouth, I'm sure she'll love it.

When I was little, I had a veritable sorority's worth of dolls. One of them was a rubber baby doll that I named "Mints." Mints never wore clothes and whenever my dad grilled out, I would fill my wagon with water from the hose and give Mints a bath. The reasons for any of this have been lost to time. I'm not against a little girl playing with dolls; I am torn by what it means to have a baby doll.

Josh and I didn't know that Juniper was a girl until she was born. I thought of her as "baby" and "the baby," something for which sex and gender was secondary, just another trait like hair or eye color. In the months since we've been home, I don't think about her gender much. She's just a beautiful little baby to me, one who has started to make funny faces and yell out random syllables and kick her legs when she's agitated or excited. Her wardrobe consists of everything from a red velvet dress with Christmas trees embroidered on the bodice to hand-me-downs from my friend Liz's sons. She even has a tiny Guns N Roses hoodie, one of the items that I couldn't not buy for her when I saw it in the baby boys' section. One of the best things about having a very small baby is the outfits, and limiting ourselves to a specific narrow type of gender expression would seriously tarnish that silver lining.

It's a good doll. I would have loved a doll like that at age 2. But as I looked at Juniper's first doll, I thought about how one day, sooner than I'd like, my daughter will encounter the world that awaits all girls, the world that awaited me (except with more dangerous weather and fewer reproductive rights. Womp.)

Josh and I will encourage her to speak her mind and stand up for herself; someday, somebody will try to shut her up and break her down. We will let her wear whatever clothing she wants and play with whatever toys she wants (within reason) but someday, somebody will tell her that the way she presents herself to the world gives people the wrong idea-- whether she's too girly or she's not girly enough. I thought about the doll, I thought about little girls and little boys, I thought about some kid at day care trying to make her feel inferior for being female, and I thought about how I wanted to fight that imaginary kid.

I haven't been a mother for long, but I can already see that one of the most difficult things about it for me will be the understanding that I can't keep her safe forever, that she will experience pain and disappointment and failure that is necessary to her development, and I will just have to watch it happen to her. I will have to encourage her to venture beyond my protection. I get it, but also: what the fuck.

All this over a doll. Imagine what a mess I'm going to be when she loses a tooth.

Image via Shutterstock