Magine Watches Dad Steve Ride Her Hovercraft

“I want to build a hovercraft,” my neighbor Ginger’s eleven-year-old daughter Magine announced to her mother recently. “For the science fair.”

Ginger, an artist/Girl Scout mother/soccer mom/mega-school-volunteer, thought of the myriad other tasks on her over-filled plate and deployed the most common deflect used by mothers today. “Go ask your father.”

Not a week later, Ginger called, very excited, and invited my husband and I to ride Magine’s new hovercraft. We raced up the block. I’ve never been more impressed. Magine’s father Steve reported that all he did was cut the wood, Magine and her classmate did all the rest of the work: planning, measuring and building the plastic air cushion along with securing it to the base. The damn thing actually held the weight of my 280-pound husband. And the contraption was hella fun to ride.

Not only was I impressed that an eleven-year-old had made a working hovercraft, I was struck by the parental support that enabled her to build it. Since I moved to San Mateo, I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of Magine and her parents. And I am continually amazed by the differences between how they raise their children and the way I was raised.

I can see my Mother’s weary face now if I had announced at eleven that I wanted to build a hovercraft. First, a withering stare. But no words. If her icy reception didn’t diminish my eagerness, then she would have said something to the effect, “Are you insane?” If that didn’t work, she’d use the ultimate, “No, and don’t bring it up again.” While we were properly cared for—read to, bathed, clothed, fed, given braces and piano lessons—parents in those days lived separate lives from their children.

When I grew up in the sixties, there was the Kid World and the Adult World and they didn’t mix. Most parties hosted by adults in the sixties did not include their children. When Mom and Dad had their cocktail parties, we were not seen nor heard. We were banished to the den to eat our TV dinners, which were manufactured back then using aluminum trays that made the meal taste like metal. Nowadays, parties mainly include both children and parents. The parents drink around the barbecue and the kids jump in the rented bouncy house.

Most of my friends today spend lots of time with their kids, doing activities. During my childhood, the relationship between parents and children was much more formal. When Dad came home, he and Mom had cocktails and we were not allowed to bother them. Dinner was a serious affair. You sat in your chair, you didn’t put your elbows on the table and you couldn’t talk out of turn. You didn’t reach across the table for the salt, you politely asked for it to be passed to you. And you had to ask to be excused from the table.

After school and during summer vacation, Mom would say, “Go play outside and don’t come back until dinner.” I spent most of my time as a child in the company of other children with little to no adult supervision. Our parents didn’t know what we did and didn’t want to know as long as it didn’t involve the police. Or blood.

While I would have liked a bit more attention, the benign neglect I experienced as a kid enabled me to explore the world of my imagination. We didn’t have video games or computers or cell phones. TV was limited to five channels. Besides, parents in those days didn’t let you laze around the house. Your life was spent outdoors with other children, creating your own entertainment.

My favorite game from childhood? Crawling Hands and Tarantulas. The lawn was infested with the horrid creatures. If you walked down the front stairs and stupidly hung around on the bottom step, the severed, bloody crawling hands would grab you and drag you screaming onto the lawn where the tarantulas would try to eat you. The cement walkway next to the lawn was unfortunately made of quicksand. So if you managed to escape the crawling hands, you could die in the quicksand if your friend didn’t save you. Kool-aid served as “super sauce” that enabled us to recover our strength and fight the evil monsters.

I credit my days of free play for giving me the ability to write novels. I was able to immerse myself entirely in another reality for hours on end, a vital skill for a successful writer. Most helpful was the make-believe world I created for my troll dolls. My trolls endured many tragedies. They lived through floods (the backyard hose) and savage tiger attacks (courtesy of Cabbage, our cat). Dad Troll fell off the roof (read: was thrown in the air as far as I could) and had to be rushed to the hospital for an operation (this is when I learned if you chop off parts of a troll, they don’t grow back.) When people ask me today how I write my stories, I tell them I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I just don’t use the trolls anymore.

When I think about the differences between now and then, I see positives with each. Magine’s parents are amazing, supportive, interactive and inspiring. Magine will grow up to be an incredible person with no limits on what she can accomplish. Yet without any guidance from my parents—living an almost feral life as a child—I have managed to perform in over fifty plays, achieved two college degrees and have written over thirty novels.

Was it the hours of free play that helped shape who I am? Are novelists born of benign neglect? Or did I need to retreat to a world of make-believe to soothe myself because I was left alone so much?

I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I’m fine. But deep in my heart, I can’t help wishing that Magine’s parents had been mine.

©2011, Janet Periat

Barbie and I both turn 50 this year. Other than our birthdays, gender and skin color (along with one other shared characteristic I will reveal later), this is where our similarities end. Yet Barbie and I have had a very complex and enduring relationship. It started off as unabashed hatred and slowly changed to adoration. In light of our shared semicentennial birthday, I have decided to chronicle our difficult and complicated journey together.

I became aware of Barbie around the age of six. Her atomic breasts are the first thing I remember noticing. They intimidated me. Appearing to me to be roughly the size of a nose cone on a Boeing 747, I remember thinking how alien she was. She represented a sexually active adult roughly the same age of the people who attended my parents’ cocktail parties. While her rock hard, nipple-less breasts were somewhat titillating (pun intended), she represented a future in which I had no interest.

Thankfully, shortly thereafter, Mattel released a Skipper doll. With her flat chest and innocent eyes, this was a doll I could relate to. Problem was, Skipper played second fiddle to Barbie. Barbie was the big woman. The boss doll. Skipper didn’t go on dates with Ken, she didn’t get married, she didn’t work at the Barbie Store. And she didn’t get a Dream House. For all her hard work, Skipper lived in the shadow of Barbie’s formidable breasts. Skipper was powerless. Skipper was inferior. Since I identified with Skipper, I began to feel inferior to Barbie. Which probably fueled my growing contempt for the buxom doll.

My hatred of Barbie culminated one afternoon at my friend Nancy’s house. Nancy had equal disgust for the synthetic brazen hussy. Instead of playing house with the doll, we stripped Barbie naked and stuffed her in an abandoned birdcage in Nancy’s garage. Basically, we created our own Guantanamo and tortured the doll. Short of waterboarding, that Barbie had a very bad day. This is my fondest childhood memory of playing with Barbie. And the last.

After that precious afternoon, I eschewed all contact with Barbie. My attachments to all life-like dolls (not that she was very life-like) was limited. Basically, I hated them. I had no interest in pretending to be a mother. Consequently, as an adult, I have chosen not to procreate. Considering the fate of Caged Barbie, this was probably a good move on my part. Instead, I preferred to play with troll dolls. For reasons I probably need to take up with my therapist, I related more to the malformed, hideous, and less human-like creatures. I didn’t reconnect with Barbie until my early twenties. As before, the contact was fueled by a deep-seated loathing.

When I went punk in 1982, I indulged in punk art, a punk haircut, punk music, punk clothing and a totally punk attitude. Part of this attitude was to reject the societal construct. To this end, Barbie helped me tremendously. Well, parts of her.

During my punk years, Barbie came to represent to me the imprisonment of women. The perfect icon for all that was wrong with the stereotypical women’s role. I blamed Barbie for the oppression of women and the reason the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t get ratified. Barbie was the enemy. And what better way to show my contempt than to attack this heinous symbol of female subjugation and servitude.

My first punk sculpture was Barbie Massacre: a bloody killing scene representing all my anger and feelings of powerlessness at the hands of The Man. After a trip to the local thrift store for materials, I took He-Man and set him up on a plastic tray I’d pulled out of a defunct refrigerator. I chopped up several Barbies: decapitating them, severing limbs and torsos. After gluing He-Man to the plastic tray, I glued Barbie’s various body parts beneath him, then added liberal amounts of stage blood. Voila! Art in Action. Fought the dominant paradigm, worried my new roommate and added a bit of pizzazz to our living room. Three worthy causes all in one shot.

After Barbie Massacre, however, I realized I wasn’t reaching the audience I needed with my grand show of contempt. So I made a collection of jewelry with mutilated Barbie parts. I made earrings out of her severed feet, pins out of her decapitated head and dismembered arms and wore them proudly around the neighborhood. Gilroy has never been the same.

As my punk rage at society became slowly replaced by the realization I needed to actually grow up and take care of myself, I created the last Barbie piece of my punk years: Barbies Under Glass. A twisted combo of nude, de-limbed Barbies tied up with wires with a scattering of miniature skulls for posterity—all stuffed into my grandmother’s bell jar. Received many compliments (and culled many people from my herd) with that artwork.

However, as time passed, a strange thing happened to my pathological hatred of all things Barbie. Somehow, through all this contact with the plastic icon, I ended up falling in love with her. Barbie now reminds me of all those fun, formative, angsty punk years.

As my attitude changed, I began to feel a deeper kinship with the doll. After all, we were born in the same year. I still have Barbies Under Glass displayed in my house. I decided to pay homage to my favorite plastic girl. I also wanted to achieve my dream of looking like an action figure naked (clearly another topic to discuss with my therapist). The only way I could attain these goals without radical plastic surgery was to get the Mattel logo tattooed on my butt. (Costs three beers to see it.) And thus my love/hate relationship with the beloved icon came full circle.

So, Happy Birthday, Barbie. And I mean that. From the bottom of my bottom.

©2009, Janet Periat