What a Doll!

This post appeared on my old blog about a year ago, before we began experiencing technical  difficulties.

This is one of my pet peeves. What could I say to these people? As much as I wanted to slap them across the face or scold "HOW DARE YOU!" I realized that many people might not understand what was bothering me. They might have even thought I was the one being rude.

Of all the sounds I heard umpteen years ago, from midnight colicky cries to accidentally tripped car alarms. none annoyed me more than this remark from people looking into my Snuggli or stroller: "Oooo, she's just a doll!" To make matters even worse, some of the same people who called my daughter a doll would see which toy she was waving in her chubby little hand and say, "Yes, you have a baby!" Even among educated adults, the stuffed or molded plastic toy purchased at a store, a toy representing a nine-year-old or an adult fashion model with exaggerated breasts no less, was allegedly a "baby," and my own living, thinking, breathing human child, the fruit of my womb, was "just a doll" as far as these people were concerned.

My husband used to shush me when I reacted to this error on people's parts and he would tell me the polite response was "Thank you." I disagreed. Thanking people for saying such a thing about one's child will simply allow them to believe that it's acceptable to go on saying such a thing about other mothers' children. To him, it was "no big deal."

But to me, it was, and remains, a very big deal. A baby is a living, breathing, thinking person who just happens to be extremely new on the job. A doll is an inert, mindless object produced by some manufacturer for somebody's amusement. I would argue that the inability of some people to tell the difference between a person and an object might well be the most serious problem in the world today.

I wanted to do something to let people know that it's wrong to confuse human beings with objects. Telling someone that she has offended one with a remark intended as a compliment is no simple matter. Eventually, I thought of a response which, while perfectly polite, might gently help people realize that they might want to take their feet out of their mouths and reconsider whether parents want to hear such remarks about their children.   What I did was to shake my head and whisper, "I'm so sorry you feel that way." If that didn't get an apology or a flustered reaction, I would add, "We like to think that our child is so much more that that."