“I am made of wood,” said Tottie. “Good wood.”

By Beck

You’ve no doubt seen the ads for them in women’s magazines, those creepily realistic wrinkled baby dolls that can be bought in installments, although I have no IDEA who buys them. No one I know, anyhow, and I know people who collect almost anything: antique poison bottles, taxidermied animals, old playing cards, chipped enamel bowls. But little dolls that look like babies? Nyah.

I loved dolls as a kid. I had dozens – baby dolls, child dolls, Barbie dolls, china dolls – which I both loved passionately and yet treated with an utter disregard. A doll could stay under my bed going white-haired with dust for months with me caring not a whit, and then suddenly rise to Favorite status. Pretty blond-haired Barbie might go from driving her camper carelessly around the yard to being the other dolls’  scullery maid. There was just no way to tell.

I also liked those books where a Wise but Neglected Child found a group of living dolls – a surprisingly full genre, considering how horrifying the idea is when you think about it. I mean, if I came into a room and there was a doll wandering around, I would probably drop dead of stark terror RIGHT THERE, likely in a grotesquely biological fashion. But even now I love me a book about dolls that are secretly, benevolently alive.

I’ve touched on being a lonely kid before, I think. I don’t feel much need to elaborate – you either were one too and so know exactly what I’m writing about or you weren’t and there’s not much need to go into it. Anyhow. One of my persistent childhood fantasies was that my dolls were secretly not only alive but also very much on my side – which seems somewhat doubtful, given the uncertain nature of their employment (one day, you’re an independent woman of means with her own snazzy automobile and the next, you’re scrubbing floors…) and the high possibility that they might fall from favour and end up in the no man’s land under the bed. But I was certain that they loved me, and had a lengthy and tender bedtime routine of making sure each doll was tucked comfortably in, wherever they had fallen in my room.

Few things are as moving to me as my children sleeping – suddenly so vulnerable, soft-cheeked and dark-lashed in the nightlight’s glow. And it is, of course, quite a bit of a cliche to say that sleeping children are beautiful – most parents feel a pang to catch sight of their children, asleep and returned however briefly to the tenderness of babyhood.

I have always thought of myself as a highly maternal woman. Even as a child, I knew that I wanted a big family, wanted lots of children to tumble about me, to pull on my skirts as I walked through a room, their names elaborate and on the tip of my tongue: Araminta, Evangeline, Fortuna, Digory, Sebastian, and on and on. Out they would pop, like mataroyshka dolls and instantly I would become a mother, calm and stern and kind.

Even now, with my oldest child nearly TEN YEARS OLD, I still find myself startled by how often I’m stricken by a sense of pretending to be a mother, of this all being a gigantic game of house. So often I feel only a few minutes older than them myself and am almost horrified to find myself the authority figure in the room, the person who is supposed to keep everything sorted out. From my perspective, their childhood is fleeting and fast-footed, ebbing away while I fumble at motherhood, and it’s beyond poignant to me that it’s only these passing glances at night that reveals them as their true selves – not like dolls, that can be forgotten and reclaimed, but as actual vulnerable, beautiful human beings, the passing glances making me feel suddenly and utterly like a mother, like I’ve been quietly alive and waiting just for that very moment.

Find Beck blogging at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.