Last night, as I was about to put Little Miss to bed, I pulled back her covers to find this little scene. “Oh, what are your Barbies doing, don’t they know it’s your bedtime?” I asked. “Oh, they’re doing their homework,” she replied matter-of-factly. “But why are they naked?” I asked. “Oh, just the mean ones are naked,” she said, as if that explained it all. “Why are they mean?” I pressed. “They just get mean when they’re naked, especially the one with the long blond hair.” (Hmm, you mean the one with the hair like mine? I thought.)
It’s things like this that make me wonder what other people, like my in-laws or my parents, would start conjuring up in their minds about our household if she were to say something like that to them. That concept was pointed out to me years ago when a woman told me that one day when she was watching her granddaughter, the “doll mom” in the dollhouse the little girl was playing with shouted, “Eat your effin’ Cheerios!” to the “doll daughter.” (She didn’t say effin’ though.) “That’s when I figured out that if I wanna know what really goes on in my daughter-in-law’s home,” the woman told me, “get ‘em a dollhouse and watch how they play with the dolls.”
Well, if that’s true, I guess I’m in big trouble. So for the record, everyone in our household does their homework fully clothed. And I don’t get mean when I’m naked.