Girlie-Dolls

My younger (by 2 years) and only brother, Ernests, had tons of dolls. My mother, an only child, always wanted a girl but knew she wouldn’t be able cause having Ern almost killed the both of them.

To compensate, she more or less treated him like a daughter. Until he was old enough to know any better, anyway. This included building up his doll collection. Big time. A very “girlie” collection too, much to the amusement of myself and my playmates. The dolls (mostly girl dolls) wore hats, frilly dresses, and even long hair and dainty eyelashes you could comb and style. Just what any little girl could hope for! And my mother would always coach him into acquiring more at every opportunity. “What kinds of dolls would you like for Christmas, Erni? Little Mandy is so cute! Wouldn’t it be great for her to have a little playmate?” Ern: “Yes, Mama!”.

This was before he followed me into making the switch to our main toy staple – guns, guns, and more guns. The more realistic looking (they didn’t have wimpy fluorescent colors for child safety in those days – we had “manly” guns made of metal!) and threatening the better. Soon after Ern’s “daughter-hood” ended we had already begun accumulating an arsenal befitting a small guerilla campaign. After a certain age it’s the only thing we wanted for Birthday’s/Christmas – “playing guns” as in “let’s play guns!” was, after all, the most popular game among the many boys in our neighborhood. My mother was horrified and openly sad that her youngest ‘daughter’ had broken free.

But while he was still ‘Mazais Ernitis’ (mazais = ‘my little’; Ernitis = Latvian diminutive for Ernests, pronounced Ehrrrrneetis) a favorite game of mine was to torture, “kidnap” (complete with ransom note), or “hang” these dolls with shoestring nooses. To my never-ending delight, Ern, who considered them living, breathing playmates would cry bitterly - then fight back like a wildcat.

One Halloween he was a witch – complete with an elaborate dress my mother spent days sewing herself. We still tease her about this. It was a long-held dream, she’s explained since, to sew beautiful outfits for the daughter she’d always wanted – just as my grandmother and great-grandmother (both sweatshop seamstresses - in this country) had done for her.

This girl-ification worked too. Cause Ern seemed to fully believe he was female for quite some time. Or at least not fully understand he was a he. Under my mum’s influence he’d consistently reject toys or ways of acting male. Until 6th grade or so he always seemed to have a girl “best friend” and gravitate towards girl playmates in general. Even now, I can’t help but think his pronounced and highly-developed “feminine side” – everyone, including his wife (who adores him for it!) notices and comments on this despite the fact my brother now LOOKS like a big, “jock-ie” ( he was an exceptional athlete) very-male (he has handsome, angular ultra-male features – a strong jaw line) doofus - is in no small part due to this early gender-bender phase of his childhood. If you asked Ern, he’d say the same without a trace of embarrassment (he’s actually quite proud of it and feels it’s given him an advantageous and unique viewpoint). Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure he noticed this connection and came up with the theory.

I should a say here, that despite being mortal enemies (and constant companions) until high school, Ern is now my closest friend. We’ve always had our own pseudo-language: a mix of sign-language, nonsense words that have their own grammatical rules, and Latvian/English slang. Let’s say we’re at a party where there are other Latvians about (ruling out Latvian as a secret form of communication). I can literally let him know exactly what I’m thinking (“the guy making a joke is NOT funny, let’s get out of here before we get sucked into an all-night booze fest” for example) with a couple of hand gestures and eye-brow signals. Friends will say “Oh oh, the Sabine brothers are in their weirdo mind-meld again”. It was with extreme delight of recognizing yourself in others that I read about Birdie and her sister’s “Elemeno”. Come to think of it, Ern and I always felt a little like we had dual identities, in a way. We never feel quite at home among Latvians (who were often openly hostile towards my dad and our last name – our Latvian school teachers would even add fake accents marks to it) nor among Americans (my mum taught us that). I hope to expand upon this later though…

But to continue - I can’t emphasize enough how much of a girl Ern was at this early stage, when the border between my mum and him-as-an-individual was at its most fluid and porous.

In fact, it’s legend in our family and among our oldest friends (our Latvian crew which we’re close enough in age to share). They still call him “Punjab” sometimes and love to laugh, tell-of and retell the nickname’s origins. To explain - this was the name of the Care Bear (actually ‘Sunshine Bear’) that went everywhere with Ern and who he named after Little Orphan Annie’s bodyguard – the movie was our fave when we were about 4 and 6.

But to wrap up this train of thought and move on to race, I can’t think of a better empirical example of Lorber’s (see particularly the intro to her piece where she describes a baby’s conditioning into its gender role pp. 54-56 in Rothenberg) description of how gender is socially constructed/imposed from the moment a baby’s born. Gender is, of course, the first door we must walk through (never to come back out; the possibilities of the other gender forever closed to us) as we become conscious of ourselves as individuals. In a way, perhaps my mum’s treatment of Ern to some extent delayed this inevitable step. At least while Ern lived only within our family. The pressure to gender, which is part of the air we breathe, the immutable law imposed by society-at-large, was of course too much. It was in kindergarten, where he was first exposed to others/society-at-large and my under my influence (I had already long been exposed to others and brought it home with me), when Ern began his gradual assumption of male-ness. I’m sure my mum was motivated in part by a desire to maintain his innocence and the taint of “pop-culture America”. In out family’s little Universe, Latvian-ness was definitely associated with the feminine and “being American” with the masculine – in a million, subtle little ways…

Could this strange gap-phase in our childhood also be why my brother and I became so obsessed with Mathew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle for a time? [Cremaster = organ in fetus that eventually descends to make male genitals or recedes to make ovaries/uterus; Barney’s exhibit is a fantastical multi-movie exploration of that imagined time of ultimate freedom and play – where ANYTHING is possible as well as the consequences of the cremaster’s development]. We went together to see his big Guggenheim show in NYC twice. I wonder. We DO go to museums together quite often but usually never see a show more than once…

I’m running out of time so I’ll have to blog about the racial component of our doll-play later. I DO have lots to say about this though…