My Great-Grandmother's Handiwork

Talking to you about how important it was for you to write honestly on your blog, I thought I'd try the same about some of the shameful behaviours I had as a kid. I think I felt that these things justified the way my family treated me. I knew it was wrong. They made fun of me for it. But I could not in any way stop it. You understand this all too well.

This is my grandmother's mother's quilt. She stitched, by hand, thousands and thousands of 3 mm stitches to make it. It is on my bed right now. Her gift to me, keeping me warm at night.

What else has she given me? TL says that emotional problems and sickness magnifies with each successive generation until it is stopped. That eventually things get worse and worse until it gets to the person who is crushed under the weight of it all. And they get help or else.

I remember: One Saturday afternoon in the fall when I was ten. I had just finished vacuuming and dusting the living room and cleaning the hall bathroom. I used carpet fresh on the gold shag carpet and so the house smelled of old church-ladies armpits. Today was also the Saturday, because my mother and I were not going to Owen Sound, that I would clean my Barbie Dolls. I had 33 of them spread over two houses. They were dressed and posed in the houses, lounging in bed or sitting on the couch.

I never, ever, played with these dolls. The only time they were ever ever touched was on cleaning day. This was the day, once a month, where I would lift the clear plastic dust cloth off the houses and gingerly remove each doll so that I could dust and clean the houses and the dolls.

The process was extensive. First of all, before I could touch the houses I had to thoroughly clean my own room and make sure my bedding was clean.

Then I would have to go to the hall bathroom and wash my hands with very hot water. Only then could I remove the dust covers from the houses and carefully place them over my closet door.

Then, of course, I would need to return to the bathroom and wash my hands with very hot water. Next, I would I remove the dolls and place them, in order of importance (loosely based on cost and time I had owned them, with the oldest dolls ranked as most important trumped only by expensive collector series dolls) on my (clean) bed.

Then I had to wash my hands. Finally, I could dust and vacuum (using a Barbie vacuum) the dollhouses.

Then I had to wash my hands and change my clothes. Then I re-dressed the dolls.

Then I washed my hands. Then I re-posed the dolls in the house into new, fascinating dioramas. For example, my one Ken doll would now be naked except for a pink see-through apron and he would be placed at the ironing board. When I was finished this process I carefully replaced the dust covers, cringing if any of the outside parts touched the inside of the house (and stopping to wash hands/re-clean that area), and
return to the bathroom to wash my hands and breathe a sigh of relief. I was done.

My Barbie’s were my most high maintenance toys. All of my other toys I kept wrapped in pillowcases within garbage bags within my closet so they did not have to get dusted.

No one else ever touched these toys or saw them. When they asked to see them I might grudgingly let them peek at the cheek of a Cabbage Patch Doll or leg of a Wrinkle Puppet but that was all. And I would rerun that moment anxiously that night as I listened to right-wing talk-radio from Boston in my headphones.

Great-Grandma, this is how I played.