Playing with Dolls
Childhood play
“Did you and your sisters ever play church with your dolls?” my friend asked. She has three brothers and one older sister and was wondering how my childhood play compared to hers.
“Did we play church?!’ I exclaimed. “Of course we did. We played on the porch steps, on the porch in chairs we lined up, on the upstairs stair steps and in the living room. It all depended on the weather,” I answered.
We not only played with our dolls, but we dressed up cats and kittens in doll clothes purchased from bins at Goodwill for a few pennies each. Goldie, our yellow-striped Tom, did not appreciate the pink dress we forced on his wiggling body. Sometime during another church service, he took off for the woods, tail sticking out from under the dress. He returned a few days later, unscathed, and dress-less. My sister remembers getting scratched from kittens who resisted our attempts to dress them. She got blood on one of her favorite doll dresses.
When our Saint Bernard, Julie, had puppies (ten of them), we had plenty of babies to use for children when we lined up on the porch steps for another church service. As the puppies grew older, they were harder to manhandle, so we went back to our dolls.
When we played with our dolls, we were usually traveling in a station wagon (so designed by the chairs on the porch) or sitting in church. Each of us had a name and our “husbands” had names, too. Of course, our husbands were imaginary, but we spoke with them nonetheless when we needed help with our babies. Cushions from the porch glider or living room sofa worked well as husbands. These imaginary husbands were often needed in the work of the church, so sometimes our row of children sat on benches with us and we handled them alone. We had rows of dolls on our pews – the more, the merrier.
In the winter or on rainy days, our church services were held inside the living room. There, the phonograph record player provided sermon material. We had many LP records of music, but not many of someone speaking. Somehow, our family obtained an LP record of the January 21, 1961 inaugural speech of JFK. That speech became our sermon. This is why I aptly remember JFK’s famous quote, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what this country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
His address lasted 13 minutes and 59 seconds. That was long enough, we thought, for a sermon. Somehow, we managed to sit with our squalling babies and restless children while the needle on the record moved in time, blaring into the living room the “sermon” for the day.
One day we decided to have “communion”. I remember that this speech was also our communion sermon. Whether Mama realized what we were doing or not, I have no clue. I think she would not have approved our using that inaugural address for a communion message. She didn’t mind that we took basins of water into the living room to wash feet at the end of the communion service. Of course, we also had to manage all our doll babies during communion and while we washed feet. It was more fun in play than when we faced that scenario in real life as adults, that’s certain.
Wonder of play
Remembering those days reminds me again that children reenact what is happening in their lives. Play helps children work through their own stories in person. In play, we flesh out real life as we see it in our childish mind. Today, my sisters and I share those good memories and realize how blessed we were to use our imaginations in the wonderful art of play.
Note: the doll is “Deborah”, so-named after a cousin’s child and belongs to my sister Rachel. “Deborah” was probably fifty years old in this photo. “Deborah” had a doll-cousin who belonged to me. Her name was “Cynthia”, also named after a cousin’s child. She no longer takes good photos, so I used this one.
