Barbie and Me

Like millions of others, I saw the Barbie Movie on its opening weekend. My 24 year old daughter was coming home and wanted to see it and for some reason that had to be on opening weekend.  After watching the preview for the movie my husband decided he maybe wanted to go too so I purchased tickets and we took our baby girl to the movie.  While other girls and women were decked out in amazing pink outfits, I donned a pink t-shirt because my husband had advised me that I needed to wear pink.  My daughter’s main concern was ordering the special Barbie cocktail that was being served.

I was an only child.  And as a young girl I loved my Barbies.  I spent hours with them.  I had all the cool accessories – the dream house, the swimming pool, the car.  I think I played with them at an older age than most girls but remember I had no siblings to get into hijinks with.  I could never say goodbye to any of them so when I finally stopped playing with them, they were boxed up and put in the garage.  When I was an adult and newly married my parents showed up for a visit with boxes of toys left over from my youth that I had long since forgotten.  Of course, some of those boxes were filled with Barbies.  I still could not part with them and hoped that one day I would have a daughter to pass them too.

When my eldest daughter was finally at an age to play with Barbie, I was so excited to introduce her to my old dolls.  We played together and it was great fun for me to have an excuse to play with dolls again. My favorite Barbie was my Miss America doll.  She had perfect brunette curls.  I say my daughter brushing out those curls and I immediately needed to save her!  I think I took her away from my daughter.  It is funny how hard it is to give up those things from our youth.  I did realize that I was being silly and handed them all over freely to my girls and bought them many during their youth.  This is not about my history with the dolls (though I did meet the original Barbie (Barbara) – at my uncle’s house when I was a young child), this is about the movie.

I was having a moment last week thinking about the oxymoron I often feel my life goals/desires are.  Then I thought about the Barbie movie.

Growing up I wanted to be a veterinarian, or a marine biologist, or a scientist who finds the cure for cancer, but what I really wanted was to be a veterinarian.  I also wanted to be June Cleaver ( well really I wanted to be Samantha from Bewitched but no matter how hard I wiggled my nose, no magic ever happened).  I wanted to be the perfect mom and wife and have the perfect house. 

I am a driven person.  I did the work and I became a veterinarian in the days before women had completely taken over the profession.  I became a wife.  I worked 60+ hours a week and still tried to keep the perfect house and cook our meals from scratch though I was never there to greet my husband with a martini as he came home from his 9-5 job.  Of course, he did not have a 9-5 job either.  Then I became a mother.  I was determined that my children would not grow up in daycare but I also could not give up my career.  I found a new career path within my profession that allowed me to work fewer hours and share my week between my two passions.  I remember hearing Oprah say one time that she did not have children because she could not give 100% to both her career and to children.  There is some truth to that statement.

So, throughout my life I have struggled as these two sides of me wage a war with each other daily and I try to give 100% to both.

I don’t know why I was surprised by the pervasive feminism in the Barbie movie.  I don’t consider myself a feminist but I should.  It wasn’t Barbie who taught me I could be anything; my parents did that.  As a s girl it was particularly empowering to have a father who had only wanted a daughter.  I was the last of my family name and he still did not have an overwhelming need for a son.  He worked in a very male centered industry and his greatest desire was for me to take over his business.  I am still sad that I could not give him that as it was so far from my calling in life.  But my father made sure that I knew that I could do or be anything I wanted and he would support me.  And he was always so very proud of me.  As girls we need strong male role models in our lives.  As women we know that our girls need this.

While I loved my dolls, my Barbie dolls set up unrealistic expectations of beauty every bit as much as the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit models did.  They did not teach me I could be an astronaut; I would not get to see this until I had my own daughters.

I don’t know why I was not prepared for such a heavily focused dose of feminism in the film but I enjoyed watching the girls as they tried to save Barbieland from the over-the-top patriarchy that Ken had introduced.  I found myself feeling and agreeing deeply with America Ferrera’s character’s speech detailing all the things expected of a woman.  I came away actually feeling understood or maybe more I found myself being verbalized on the big screen.

My daughter and I discussed some of this when we got home that night.  Fortunately, this was not a man hating movie even though Ken did not get to end with the intelligence or purpose the girls still had.  I can understand how this may have been too much for the men in the audience.  I think it resonated with me because we see so many things now about the struggles of so many in our world.  I will never know what it is like to be an African American woman.  My husband will never know what it is like to have grown up as a woman in this world and it was nice for me to feel like I had finally found something personal to my world.

I raised my daughters to be “strong independent women”.  They heard this line many times in their youth.  I explained that I never wanted them to have to rely on someone else because you never know when you will need to be the breadwinner in the family.  My daughter was very proud recently when she managed to get her new vacuum’s holder hung perfectly on the wall using the tools that belonged to her and without her fiancé’s assistance.  She let me know that she had taken the lesson to heart and I was a proud mama!

I have experienced my share of patriarchy in my lifetime and even in the war that wages within me to be both an accomplished, driven, professional, successful business woman and a perfect 20 inch waist, vacuum wielding, dinner cooking, angelic children raising, martini serving housewife. As Barbie learns in the movie perfection is not attainable in human life but who would really want perfection.  It is all about the journey with all the bumps and twists  and turns along the way.  I think it is time for me to wear more pink and  to embrace my imperfections and see what the rest of this life has in store for me! (and to look forward to granddaughters one day that will let me play Barbie dolls with them!)