The Dollhouse Furniture

There's a doctor somewhere out there who has brought me much grief. No, I was not her patient. No, nobody I know has been or is her patient. Why then? Because she never returned what she borrowed from me nearly 15 years ago.

We weren't even friends really. We went to school together. She was a few years older than me and I had "little sister syndrome." I wanted to hang with the older kids and do everything they were doing. No, don't worry, I never got myself in trouble....for the most part.

10th grade science was chemistry. They had a mole project assigned, and she was making a little "mole" house I think. She asked if I had dollhouse furniture and wanted to borrow them for her project. Me, having "little sister syndrome," immediately let her borrow the pieces she wanted. They were some of my favorites - the shower, the toilet (with a lid that actually lifted up and down), a sofa, etc.

Years after she had finished 10th grade chemistry and was about to graduate, I remember asking people to ask her about returning my dollhouse furniture. Because we weren't actually friends and the introvert and ever developing passive aggressive side of me thought it inappropriate to directly ask her for them back myself. I remember asking a friend to ask her, and he told me when he asked her about returning the pieces, she became angry. Who does that?

I never got the dollhouse furniture back. Years and years later when I was cleaning out my dad's house, I looked again at my incomplete set of dollhouse furniture which was missing some of my favorite pieces. It'd been so many years, I had long given up on ever seeing them again. I boxed away the remaining pieces and gave them away. I had convinced myself it wasn't worth keeping an incomplete set.

It was just a simple $10 40-pc set of girly dollhouse furniture from Toys 'R Us. Everything was constructed of plastic in shades of white, pink, and light blue. I loved that set of dollhouse furniture. The drawers and cabinets actually opened and closed. The tiny television had a sticker of New York City with the Statue of Liberty framed between the Twin Towers. The set came with a mommy, daddy, and baby doll. The baby even had a cradle that rocked back and forth.

As a child I asked for a lot of things. I wanted a lot of things as children do. And for the most part, I did not get them. This is not to say I did not receive things I wanted or that my mother never bought me things. She bought me a lot of things - clothes, books, snacks - but when it came to toys, she was always the first to say no. With all the toys I had growing up - and I had a lot, most of them meticulously taken care of and saved to this day - I remember my dad buying them.

I remember looking in the Toys 'R Us ad and flipping through the colorful pages. I saw this set of dollhouse furniture and remember it costing $9.99. Surely that price for the value would convince my mother to buy it for me. 40 pieces for $10? That's $0.25 a piece - what a steal! I showed it to my mother, and she actually agreed to buy it for me. I still remember going to the store with her, and she asked the salesman to get a package from the top shelf because she wanted to make sure the box we bought was in good condition.

Thinking about this memory always makes me cry. There's anger. There's sadness. I've told myself over and over again I just need to get over it and move on. In some ways I have. Over the years I've always just thought the dollhouse furniture was sentimental to me because my mother bought it, and having lost her, it made the things she gave me more meaningful. This time, when this memory resurfaced, I realized why this set of colorful, cheap plastic was truly sentimental: my mother said yes.