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September 22, 2005
Help! My Daughter Wants a Barbie for Christmas..
Parenting was so Goddamn easy before I gave birth. My kids were never going to be allowed to play with guns and boy was that whore Barbie never making it past my doorstep.
What with Littleone hanging out with boys the whole time, the gun issue has come up. I caught her a while back firing her two fingers trying to shoot me from behind the sofa. So I went through that whole ‘When people die, they don’t ever get up..’ talk and thankfully it seemed to work and I thanked my lucky stars that seeing as she is a tomboy I probably wouldn’t have to go through the whole Barbie thing.
Wrong! Sometime over the holidays she discovered that she was a girl after all. I think it started when someone got her a jewellery box for her birthday. Anyway it all came to a head yesterday when that bloody advert for Barbie Pegasus came on the TV and she gasped, clapped her hands together and out came those all too familiar words,
‘Can I have it? Oh purleeeeessssssse?’
So instead of putting my foot down straight away I found myself struggling to remember what it was I despised so much about Barbie in the first place. True her body is not exactly natural, we all remember that article where someone with too much time on their hands sat and worked out what Barbie’s vital statistics would be in real life but do I honestly think that Barbie and Barbie alone is going to coerce my daughter into becoming an anorexic cocaine snorting loser (I-will-not-blog-about-Kate-Moss. I-will-not-blog-about-Kate-Moss) Where are the studies that prove that most Barbie fans end up with eating disorders? Surely this problem is not only with the media (of which Barbie is a small fish in a very big sea) but also ourselves and the kind of messages we project to the young girls around us. Even at the school gates I hear mothers ranting on about how they are jealous because so-and-so is back in her size 8 jeans and her baby is only six weeks old. Could it be that we are using a lump of plastic as a scapegoat for our own insecurities?
Or could it be I am making excuses because I’m a mother now and a smile on my daughter’s face is worth more to me than any of my long held principles?
I think that since those heady days when I had time to philosophise about such matters. I’ve discovered that there exist in the world far worse toys than Barbie. All those garish light-flashing, tune playing, monosyllabic-voiced monstrosities for instance and that tacky plasticy rubbish that falls apart before you’ve even got it through the door. (I was looking for a nice mirror the other day to go with the jewellery box and gave up looking in the toy department because I couldn’t find one that didn’t flash.) Oh and guns I’m still adamant about that.
If Littleone had to have a Barbie then I’d rather she had the Pegasus than any other, I can just see it sparking her imagination as she makes up these tales of myth and fantasy. Oh and she’s only having this or this but certainly NOT this because it scares me too much; I’ve had a phobia of decapitated heads ever since I was really young but that’s another blog post altogether.
So there you have it, I stuck with the gas and air only birth plan, I stuck with the breastfeeding past the recommended six month mark and I stuck with those cloth nappies until potty training. Perhaps I’m about to make the biggest U turn of my parenting career?
Watch and weep, it doesn’t happen often
Posted by purple elephant at September 22, 2005 10:40 PM