Valley of the 37 Dolls and 250 Pencils
Clutter, clutter, everywhere
I went into my three-year-old daughter’s bedroom the other day and nearly lost my shit. It’s messy. The sort of messy that makes me want to claw my own face off.
There was a time when it was organized. The duration of that time was approximately six hours.
I had spent an entire day on my knees separating her little toys into thematic piles. I had gone to Target to buy bins to contain each pile. Here’s where the Mr. Potato Head parts go. Here’s a pile for small dolls and action figures. Here’s where all of the little accessories for the dollhouse can go. Here are the Magna-Tiles. Here are the dress up clothes. Here is the fake food that she plays with in her play kitchen. Once I was done with that, I put everything into the little bins. I put lids on the bins, and I stacked them on a shelf.
Within one hour of her returning home, the room was a mess again. And it wasn’t just like my kid had taken one of the boxes and dumped its contents on the floor. She’d done that to ALL of the boxes. It must have happened so quickly; I did not see or hear her do it. She’d somehow taken everything and mixed it all up again, in ways that only made sense to her preschool brain. All of my work, now a kicked over sandcastle in the beach of chaos that is her room.
Juniper has a bunk bed. We got it with the expectation that by the time she is big enough to sleep on the top bunk, her little sister Daisy will be ready to take her place on the bottom bunk. But in order for that to happen, I will somehow need to figure out what to do with the menagerie of stuffies that lives on the top bunk. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a place to store the stuffies. In order for that to happen, there needs to be shelf space. In order for that to happen, the toys must be organized. In order for that to happen, I need to sort through everything that’s been dumped onto the floor.
The task is a moonshot. I must complete it in one go, or the entire mission will be doomed to fail at the hands of the whirlwind of mess that is my child. And every time I’ve tried to begin the task of organizing Juniper’s room, I’ve found myself distracted or pulled away midway through the task, which is basically worse than not starting the task in the first place.
I found a matchbox car, a half a yellow crayon, and a single child’s glove in my work bag the other day. I doubt we’ll ever see that glove’s mate again.
During a cabinet meeting last week, President Trump said, of his proposed 145% tariffs on Chinese goods that were poised to raise prices on most products purchased in America, “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
When NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump about those comments during their Meet the Press interview days later, the possessions of the theoretical spoiled child now included two hundred and fifty pencils, and now the child in question is a “beautiful baby” 11-year-old girl. And the president tripled down on the “fewer dolls” line.
Here’s that exchange:
KRISTEN WELKER: So let’s talk about the tariffs. And I want to ask you about something you said this week. Got a lot of attention. You were at your Cabinet meeting. You said, quote — I’m going to quote what you said — “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Are you saying that your tariffs will cause some prices to go up?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: No. I think tariffs are going to be great for us because it’s going to make us rich.
KRISTEN WELKER: But you said some dolls are going to cost more. Isn’t that an acknowledgment that some prices will go up?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs — that’s 11 years old — needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.
KRISTEN WELKER: When you say, “They could have three dolls instead of 30 dolls,” are you saying you’re —
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I’m saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls —
KRISTEN WELKER: – that Americans could see empty store shelves?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: No. No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.
Just to drive home the fact that the bit about kids having fewer dolls wasn’t a throwaway line; Trump used it later that day, when questioned by reporters on Air Force One. This time, the number of dolls owned by the imaginary spoiled child increased to 37. “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old-girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old-girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.” No mention of hundreds of pencils.
I doubt that Donald Trump has ever tried to organize a three-year-old’s room. And I find it pretty gross that a man who shits in a gold toilet is lecturing a country where many people can’t afford three dolls without the tariffs about personal sacrifice for the greater good. When he announced this week that he had solved the tariff problem that he was about to cause by pulling back his stupid plan, a part of me wondered if it would be best for my household if I just pretended that the tariffs existed, anyway.
When I walked into Juniper’s room Sunday evening, I discovered that she’d emptied her box of crayons into her dress up bin. What if each of these crayons had been 145% more expensive? Would I currently be individually picking hundreds of them out of tulle velcro-on skirts and a Darth Vader mask? Maybe she does only need five crayons.
I know that the fact that my kid has way too much stuff is a reflection of both my privilege and my lack of self-restraint. We live in a small house. We don’t have space for a large Spider-man shaped pillow. But every time I see something that I think my daughter would like, I have to try to talk myself out of buying it for her. I love making her happy. I love giving her a little surprise to remind her that I’m proud of her. She loves little surprises. Our house teems with child-related clutter.
I’ve gotten better in recent months– but the damage has already been done, as evidenced by the panic-inducing mess of her bedroom, and the way that her toys find themselves in every nook and cranny of the house. I found a nude Elphaba doll sitting on the shower mat the other morning. I don’t know what happened to the doll’s dress and shoes. Maybe they’re in the toaster or something.
When the president started yammering on about how the kids need to learn to make do with less, my husband tried to see the bright side for us personally. Maybe the tariffs would mean that we stopped adding to the toy pile on top of the bunk bed. Maybe the tiniest sliver of a silver lining, for us specifically, would be that we recalibrated our consumption. Of course, the downside for the economy at large would be that we may be plunged into a depression, the effects of which will be felt by generations. Maybe the American experiment is over. But hey, at least I will be able to see the floor.
I have this. I’m sorry it’s from Amazon and that we both have this amount of stuffies.
https://a.co/d/4x5VUMw