I used to sit there for hours, criss-cross-applesauce, playing,
lost in a world that only existed in my dreams.
We didn’t have much money back then for fancy toys.
While other girls were getting Barbie Dream Houses and the brand new Nintendo system,
I got this – The inside cabinet of our living room coffee table, and a used Atari my dad found in the newspaper, complete with a full box of dusty games.
Because it was solid dark brown wood, and not every other girl’s Barbie Pink,
I set out to spruce up that coffee table cabinet I would use as my dollhouse.
I would roll tape up to stick on the backgrounds I collaged, and fasten tiny artwork that I’d made.
My Barbies weren’t just there for hairstyles and fashion shows.
My Barbies were living daring lives with surprise pregnancies and long-lost-twin story-lines that would put any telenovela to shame.
There were times I felt bitter about that coffee table dollhouse, and the fact I always had to move my dad’s hunting magazines to make room for my own things.
On many days I would walk alone downtown to the little stationery shop with the lit-up window dollhouse display, and I would stare at the miniature pin-tucked sofas, and tiny real porcelain bathtubs they had for sale.
I would long to open a birthday package one day filled with things just like them,
then I would sigh and return home to that old brown coffee table;
My Irritatingly Blank Canvas of Play.
It took until I was older and raising my own children in a modern age with gratification constantly at their fingertips to see the truth of what that old brown coffee-table-turned-dollhouse had been doing in me.
After all, The Gift of Boredom is one you have to wait to be able to see.
Those hours spent criss-cross-applesauce on the floor beside those hunting magazines had fostered creativity and imagination that have been lifelong.
What I didn’t have, I had to make.
What I couldn’t make, I imagined to be.
I may have wished for the same dollhouse as every other girl, but what I didn’t realize yet was that I had been given something much more valuable than any pink plastic Dreamhouse:
That blank slate of brown wood sitting on that shag carpet had taught me to dream.
As a mother I have worried often that I have made it too easy on my girls, trying to provide them with everything they want, eliminating all struggle,
tying on my cape to save them from everything.
I have forgotten that sometimes the creation of what is most beautiful, and imaginative often comes from the times of only having one single piece of paper, or a boring coffee table cabinet,
or one little roll of scotch tape.
As I have grown I have thought many times about that old brown coffee table.
It has even come up once or twice in my counseling, as if it is calling out to me from the past, begging me to look at what it has stood for to me.
It has taken until now to realize that what it stands for is that sometimes the best character traits in ourselves come from what starts out as a seemingly un-desirable thing.
The move we didn’t plan on,
the job that we found ourselves in,
the child with a disability, or the different-than-we-expected personality.
Over and over from this side of life I am able to see the beauty that can come from the unexpected things.
I wasn’t born for the same dollhouse every other girl had.
I was born to have to imagine from the beginning.
Each time I did was a stepping-stone leading me to myself; Wiser, full of art, and music, and stories.
At the end of this month, if all goes as expected,
I will welcome my first grandchild;
A baby girl, due, meaningfully, in the Month of Thanks.
I cannot explain what this brand new chance to watch a new life unfold has done in me.
Last month was my daughter’s baby shower,
and long before it happened I knew what I wanted my special gift to my coming granddaughter to be.
I scoured Marketplace and found the exact perfect thing:
Her very own simple wooden-cabinet-turned-dollhouse to sit by and dream.
I hope when she sits in front of it, growing, learning her own lessons, crafting a life she will look back on one day, she feels free to live differently than all the other girls, able to imagine things she can’t yet fully see.
I hope she stands at her own lit-up windows in life and can visualize a world of possibility,
and that she turns on one heel and goes off to create whatever it is she thinks up.
I spent hours hand-painting her little cabinet, because, in this gift of imagination,
I hope to pass on a small piece of me,
Her Grandmother: Born of plain brown wood and boredom.
I hope to teach her what I’ve learned about things like blank canvases,
and wide open space,
and seeing the true beauty in what,
at first-glance,
is just an average-seeming thing.
My wish for my children’s children is that sometimes they are bored,
and that boredom gives birth
to whoever they imagine themselves to be.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
