Caridad Moro-Gronlier Miami (Mary Block)
In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse I was too young to understand just how young my mother was when she worked the nightshift at TRW, building spacecrafts with her hands, too young to know how it felt to hand over the whole of her check to my father who gave her an allowance-- ten dollars after 40 hours, ten dollars he’d drop into her palm every pay day. I understood Barbie called the shots. That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken, an accessory sans the authority to tell her what to do. I wrote thirty-one letters to Santa that year, but he wasn’t in charge. My father was. I thought I stood a chance because Mami loved Barbie’s mid-century mod A frame too, how the chalet gleamed up at us from the slick pages of the Sears catalog, the wonder of real jalousie windows and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled on the kitchen table where she calculated just how long she’d have to lay that chalet away, just how much she’d have to beg to convince my father to pay. I watched her turn the page, no dogear to save her place. I’d like to say I was happy with the Barbie Dream Plane she placed under the tree, but I blamed her. It would take years to understand she didn’t want me to dream of staying put, she wanted me to dream of flying away. Originally published in https://www.limpwristmagazine.com/lw6 |
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