27 February, 2009

Childhood Adieu

A friend of mine, Marie, was visiting today from Denmark. Marie came to Luebeck with her partner and two small girls. This morning, I suggested to my thirteen-going-on-fourteen-year-old daughter whether she’d consider going through her old dolls and passing on something to little Tira and Lina. So, before she went off to school she put her choice of dolls in her beautiful hand-carved wooden doll bed and told me in passing, “We might as well give it all to Tira”.

under_bed

I looked at the dolls; each bought at different times throughout my daughter’s younger years, and became quite weepy. “You sure you want to do this? Maybe you would like to give them later to your own daughters”, I asked her as casually as I could muster. She gave the impression of being so worldly as she dismissed this idea, telling me that she is like me, not at all sentimental about such things. She said that since she didn’t get anything from me from my childhood, she was going to be like that later as well.

What she didn’t know was the existence of my double standard system. Even if I don’t feel connected to things from my pass, it doesn’t mean that I am not connected to things from her pass. Does this make any sense?
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1 comment:

  1. Pam5:59 pm

    This made me sort of sad and also, kind of envious. Our childhood stuff got tossed rather unceremoniously and there are things I remember which I would like to still have, even though I'm not so very materialistic. The few things I do still have - books, mostly, and Cookie, a teddy bear who is not much younger than I am - are because I held on to them with an absolute death grip, hauling some of them around the planet for fear of losing them. But where are those Raggedy Anne dolls? What happened to them?

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