this woman’s work

Raggedy Ann (my mom again)

Oct 31, 2003 The Story of My Life

Writing that entry yesterday reminded me of this story and I wanted to get it into my blog for safekeeping. Be forewarned: it’s very long. Really really long.

When I was about four, we lived in Sacramento. On weekends, my parents used to take us to look at open houses just because they thought it was fun. A lot of the model houses we went to were furnished and my brother, sister and I used to run to the kids’ bedrooms and pick out which ones would be ours.

At one house there was a bedroom with dark red painted walls. I beat my brother and sister to the doorway then stopped cold because there on the bed was a giant Raggedy Ann. I promptly fell in love with her. I mean I loved her and I went back to drag my mom in to see. The doll was taller than I was and very, very heavy with a hard, packed stuffing. I stayed in that room for the rest of the visit, pretending that I lived there.

A tradition at our house on Christmas morning was that Santa always left one unwrapped present for each of us under the tree. (This bought my mom and dad extra sleep-in time because we could play with those toys right away.) That year, I found a giant Raggedy Ann, just like the one in the model home, sitting in my dad’s antique barber’s chair with a big tag with my name on it propped in her lap.

It really seemed like magic to me because I hadn’t even thought that they made other Raggedies like that. It never occurred to me to put her on my Christmas list and so I had resigned her to the part of my mind that included other magical things that I believed in but figured I would never get to really experience. Things like flying reindeer and sugarplum fairies. But there she was, sitting up and smiling at me.

That doll was so heavy. At four, it took a lot to drag her off the chair and over to the couch where we could sit curled up together. My bubbe (my dad’s grandmother) came over later that day and it’s the clearest memory I have of her. I had my Raggedy Ann laying on the couch next to me and I was lying on the other side.

“Where is Dawn?” Bubbe said. “I can’t see her anywhere!”

I giggled thinking, “What a stupid bubbe that she can’t even see me!”

It was decades and Bubbe was long gone before I realized that she could see me and that she was playing with me.

My giant Raggedy Ann remained my best friend. I had other raggedy toys and a slew of smaller dolls but she was the matriarch to my stuffed animal clan. I created an elaborate social structure among my toys and she was a benevolent caretaker to them all. When Pooh and Smokey got in arguments, she mediated. When the grown-up dogs and cats had trouble with their puppies and kittens, she offered sage advice. Sometimes I tried to fit her into bed with me but she was so big that she always ended up pushing me out so I sat her on the end of my bed or at my desk with a book to read.

I used to love arranging her to look “real.” I dragged her out to the swing set and set her up to swing and she was my crowning glory whenever I made my bed — a rare event indeed. I paid careful attention to how I crossed her legs and which lucky toy got to sit in her lap, cradled in her big mitten hands.

Eventually we could trade clothes so I wore her dress and she wore my red jogging suit. The year that I was eight or nine, my mom made a beautiful Raggedy Ann costume for Halloween and Raggedy inherited my pantaloons and apron since her own were getting pretty tattered.

I really loved her.

I was about twelve when my parents split up. My dad moved in with his secretary and my mom started going to work. It was very lonely but we were managing. Before, when my parents were married, my father traveled all of the time. He would be gone for two weeks then come back on weekends to talk on the phone to his salespeople and mow the lawn. He was a very mysterious figure in our life. After the separation, we saw a lot more of him. That is, until his announcement.

He took the three of us out to dinner along with G., his girlfriend, and when G. got up to use the bathroom he told us that she was pregnant and they were getting married. My first half-sister was born the month after I turned 13.

I can’t remember when it happened exactly, but at some point during one of our weekend visits (which we eventually lobbied to change to every other week since we found our new step-mom such an awkward person to be around) he asked us to please get out our old toys and give them to him for his new baby.

The three of us had set aside our precious old favorites to keep for our own children someday. We did this very deliberately and these were specific, special toys. We had our mom’s blessing in this and she helped us pack away our Fisher-Price little people and our enormous collection of Dr. Seuss books.

Now let me just add here that when my mom was a little girl, she had a favorite comic book. It was Cinderella (and no wonder, if you think about it.) One day her father ripped it up in front of her for no reason except that she loved it. Because of (or perhaps despite) incidents such as this, my mom had immense respect for our play and the things that we loved. Every year we sorted through our toys to find some to give away but she never pressured us to give up the things that we most loved even when we had long outgrown them.

We came home from my dad’s that night feeling very worried and pressured. My father was insistent that we come up with some of our old favorites to share with our new sibling and we wanted to please him. But we also wanted to keep our toys. My mom said that this was a decision that we had to make ourselves but encouraged us to let our father know that any toys we gave him were a loan only because we had plans to give these same toys to our own children someday and that’s why they were saved so carefully.

I talked to my mom about this recently and she says that conversation made her very sad because she could see how much we wanted our father to be happy with us . He was slipping away from us to his new family and we wanted him to come back so we dutifully went to the basement and dragged up the Fisher-Price and the books. I also went upstairs and took my giant Raggedy Ann off the bed. I still loved her but I could just see my father’s face when I showed him how generous I could be. After all, Raggedy Ann! I would loan my new baby sister Raggedy Ann and that would show him how much I loved him. So I did. And I told him that Raggedy Ann would be my baby’s toy someday so he needed to be sure that his new daughter would be very careful with her.

My relationship with my father got worse as my teen years progressed. He had another daughter and I dyed my hair green and started sleeping with my boyfriend. We fought almost every time we saw each other and then he reneged on his promise to buy my books for college each quarter so I quit talking to him. Two years later after getting therapy and meeting Brett, my dad and I signed what was then an uneasy truce.

I moved to Portland and started work at the shelter. One day on a newsgroup, I came across a collector’s discussion about my Raggedy Ann. I hadn’t been able to ask my dad about her and hadn’t seen her when I visited but I figured she was in the basement playroom. I had been wanting her back for some years. My half-sisters had never loved her like I had and they were getting so big anyway that I figured maybe they wouldn’t mind returning her.

I called my big sister and asked her if she could feel my dad out about returning Raggedy Ann to me. There was dead silence on the line.

“Dawn,” she said hesitantly. “He threw her away.”

“What??”

“He threw her away. I saw her on top of his trash one night when I was visiting. She’s gone.”

It took her awhile to convince me that she wasn’t kidding and then I got angry that she hadn’t saved her. Then I called my mom and cried. She was pretty mad. Let me just say here that my parents’ split was as amicable as a split can be until my dad started blowing us off for his new family. Then she started hating him and frankly, I don’t think she’ll ever forgive him. They can be in the same room together now, which is a nice change, but she cannot stand that he didn’t come through for us. She doesn’t have any feelings against my (former, they’re now divorced) step-mom or my dad’s other children but that man hurt her babies and it makes her see red.

Anyway, my mom said that I needed to calm down before I called my dad because if I started the conversation in tears, he wouldn’t listen to me. She also said that I could ask him to replace Raggedy because she had, after all, been a loan. So we talked about that for a bit, about replacing her and whether that would make up for her loss (no) but whether or not it still mattered to me to give a Raggedy like that to my kids (it did).

A week or so later I called my dad who got defensive, as usual, and uneasily jovial, as usual. I stayed calm, told him that I wanted a replacement once I had a baby and also told him to gather up the rest of the toys because my big sister, Erica, was going to come over to get them. He was relieved to get off the hook so easily because our previous disagreements had usually resulted in me completely flipping out.

I knew my dad hadn’t really heard me and I didn’t expect to ever see my Raggedy replacement but I was proud of myself for not letting this ruin the very fragile relationship I’d managed to build with him. I was still really sad. I’m always sad when I get reminded of how low I am on my dad’s emotional totem pole. I would think about Raggedy sitting out on the curb, think about how my dad tossed her out without calling me first (he said she smelled moldy from being in the basement playroom; I said that he should have taken better care of her or returned her and that he should have afforded me the courtesy of a call before throwing her away), and I would cry not just for her but because it’s hard to feel loved when your dad keeps disregarding your feelings and making excuses about it.

I wrote to a newsgroup about it, which you can find here because I really wanted a replacement but looking for one made me sad so I let it go. I did tell my sister about my hunt and she forwarded that link on to my mom.

My birthday rolled around a few months later. I was turning 26 and Brett I were also trying for a baby. January in Portland tends to be gloomy. My job was burning me out and I was dragging myself to work that morning. I stopped by the post-office to pick up a package that they had tried to deliver when I wasn’t home. It was a big soft very light package from my mom and I figured it was clothes. I took it into my boss’s office to unwrap.

Inside I found a Raggedy Ann. She wasn’t my Raggedy Ann but she was close. As tall as a three or four year old and light enough to easily tote around. I sat her in my lap, looking at her smiling at me and started to cry. I told my boss the story and she started to cry and wanted a hug from the doll, too. The one of the casemanagers came in and we told her my story then she started to cry and we all sat there for awhile crying and passing around the doll and thinking about what a nice mom I had. It turns out that she looked for a replacement and not finding one, had settled for the new version, which was much smaller but still pretty impressive.

A few months later I was pregnant with Noah and my mom sent on a matching Raggedy Andy.

I took Noah’s picture cradled in the doll every three months for his first year. Now it’s a birthday tradition to take his picture with those dolls. He doesn’t love them like I did but I don’t know if any child could. Although the littlest visitors to our house usually like to drag them around.

I’ve forgiven my father for everything, not just the Raggedy Ann incident. As my friend with the lousy father says, “It’s not the daddy I would have picked but it’s the daddy I got.” Yes, he’s the daddy I got. Fortunately, I got my mommy, too. If you’re going to have an obtuse father, it’s always nice to get an empathic mother in the same deal. It doesn’t erase the pain but it certainly eases it a bit.

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