Growing up, I adopted stuffed animals and dolls from anywhere and everywhere and gave them names and birthdays. My Cabbage Patch doll was the matriarch of these hodgepodge adoptees. She had yellow yarn hair, blue eyes, and a hard plastic head with permanent dimples. She occupied the place of honor on my pillow and supervised every stuffed animal parade and tea party.
One traumatic nine-year-old evening I wandered into my bedroom to find two of my Barbies lying mutilated on the floor, covered with blue ink mustaches and tattoos. I followed laughter to my parents' room across the hall, but froze in horror at the door. My brothers--Dave certainly, but there may have been others--my brothers had shaved my precious Cabbage Patch doll and drawn a face on the back of her bald head, leaving a fringe of yellow yarn hanging on her new chin as a grotesque beard. Cruelty! Murder! And they were
laughing about it. I sobbed; I screamed; I grabbed the doll. Part of me remembers swinging her mutilated plastic head and trying to crush Dave's skull. I have bad aim. No one cared.
Mom had one answer for all of these atrocities: "Don’t worry, your brothers won’t be so mean to you when they grow up." Right. I wanted the lot of them hung up by their thumbs screaming, and she wanted me to wait ten years before I could play with my stuffed animals in peace.
But she was right. They grew up. Me too. By then I wasn't playing with my dolls; instead I was embracing teenage awkwardness. I remember proudly toting my whole locker in a ridiculous stack and spending fifteen minutes per class ostentatiously searching for each handout that I needed. I was pathetically starved for attention. I like to think that there were some who mercifully said, “It’s OK. She’ll grow up," instead of, "What a loser." It took a while, but I did grow up.
Last week, I went to the dentist. The hygienist looked at my file and said, “Are you on any medications? I see last time you were here, you were doing chemotherapy.”
I answered, “Oh, no, I’m done with that.I did radiation in January, and now just regular check-ups.”
“Wow,” she said. “You really grow from something like that.” She said it so casually that I wanted to laugh, as if cancer was a patch that I could sew on to my Boy Scout sash, maybe right next to "having a baby" or "death of a loved one." Cancer was useless; it didn't even give me radioactive superpowers. Or maybe I’m just block-headed and couldn't even learn something when it’s injected into my right arm. Maybe I should try again?
One of these days I’m going to learn how to be a mother. I’m going to stop obsessively checking Facebook, anxiously engage in a good cause, and do many good things of my own free will. One of these days I’ll grow up. Thank goodness Warren's the merciful type. Until then, I guess I’ll just keep trying.
