Over the holidays, my wife and I packed up our son for our annual voyage to Portland to visit my family. Expecting rain, we stayed in an Airbnb with a glorious basement full of toys. Among the fake pizza slices and soccer balls and swords and rocking horses and hairy spiders, our son found a cheap babydolls nightwear, and he loved it. He hugged it, patting its back. He kissed it. He pretended to change its diaper (“Poopy! Yuck!”). He put the baby doll into a bag and tried to stick it on his shoulders, like a makeshift Baby Bjorn. He laid it down to sleep, pulling a blanket over its tiny plastic features, holding a finger up to his lips, whispering, “Shhhh.”
This was not exactly a surprise: he spends a lot of time with a two-year-old who loves baby dolls, and he’s picked up some of the basics of doll care from her. But seeing his joy at nurturing this little toy made me resolve that when we got back home, I’d go to the toy shop and get him a baby doll of his very own. My wife and I asked each other why hadn’t we bought him one already. Why do we say “We should get him a truck,” when we see him playing with another kid’s truck, but not “We should get him a doll” when we see him playing with another kid’s doll?
And so, this weekend, I headed north to the Berkeley toy store with him in the stroller. As we meandered up the streets, voices appeared in my mind, unbidden, and from some previous era of fatherhood: “see thru lingerie are for girls. Dolls are for girls.”
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