D R A M A_ Q U E E N

Drama Queen Winner
What toys ruined your life?

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T A B L E_ T A L K

How deeply do you despise/love Martha Stewart? Cast stones/sing praises in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Kids just want to have fun
By Anne Morrow Sampson
Why do the toys I bought my kids to improve their hand-eye coordination and spatial dexterity just sit in the closet?
(12/02/98)

The men's room
By Diane Lore
There's no rest for parents weary of making the decision whether to send their kids into public bathrooms
(12/01/98)

Go with the flow
By Jenn Shreve
A small, vocal group of women wants you to toss out your pads, tampons and liners and go -- no joke -- reusable
(11/30/98)

Thanksgiving
By Anne Lamott
If I can muster the love and patience it takes to deal with my mother, does it still count if my hands are trembling with rage?
(11/25/98)

Turkey fry
By Jennifer Reese
An old lover taught me the sexiest type of Thanksgiving cooking and how to do something sacrilegious and preposterous to a national symbol
(11/24/98)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Salon Columnists

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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S A L O N
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TWINNS | PAGE 1, 2
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It should be obvious from the list above that sports aren't a big part of the My Twinn^TM world. Neither is any other form of physical activity, or dirt or boys. There is one boy shown in the catalog, with two outfits -- jeans and a polo shirt or sweats. The poseable version is recommended for boys, "because it offers more options for creative display and playability." For girls there are a few casual outfits and a trunkload of dresses my own daughter would, literally, rather not be caught dead in. One, a midnight blue velour dress with matching hair bow worn by a blond, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, red-lipped little girl, can only be called the JonBenet Ramsey Special.

All the girls in the catalog and all their matching dolls are really pretty, coifed and made up and terribly clean, and the dolls do look remarkably like them. The dollmakers use photographs and a strange "Personal Profile"^TM of skin tone (six colors, from pale "porcelain" to "dark brown"), hair color (15 variations, from yellow-white to black), eye colors (26), eyelash and eyebrow color, shapes and thickness, and a variety of hair styles.

I called the manufacturers and they assured me that, yes, they do add birthmarks and port wine stains if you want. Dimples, cleft chins and pierced ears are still not available. The recent trend of "visibility" has given the world dolls in wheelchairs, dolls with leg braces, dolls with glasses and hearing aids, and I think the My Twinn^TM people would like to go along with that. (Among the accessories, they do sell a pair of nerdy glasses.) I didn't ask about facial disfigurement or burn scars or lazy eyes; these are probably more difficult than dimples. Missing limbs could, I imagine, be managed.

The intent here is reproduction and a strange form of companionship. The dolls allow a child to have "a special friend that looks like her, dresses like her, and goes with her" -- a doll that, perhaps not coincidentally, spares the child all the messy misunderstandings and petty betrayals of ordinary human friends and the parents all the wrestling matches of sibling rivalry or the painful exclusion real twins can create.

"Suddenly one wonderful child is transformed into an irresistible duo, and creativity has a field day." What kind, I can't imagine. I had only a few dolls: a battered stuffed yellow monkey, my lifelong favorite; a weakling tiger I still have on my bed; a hard plastic baby doll I used mainly for hitting my sister. The most creative thing I did with dolls was to make Barbie and Ken have sex. The most creative thing my first child did was to set GI Joe on fire in the driveway.

The most creative thing my daughter did was, at the age of 4, to pick out a soft African-American girl doll and name it Boy. That's why I laughed at the testimonial from the adoptive mother who thought My Twinn^TM dolls could "have such a positive effect" for adopted children who otherwise feel so "different." An identical doll -- what a solution to the subtle experiences of interracial families.

I do believe the My Twinn^TM people mean well. But the photographs of girls with their look-alike dolls remind me of unequal twins, the kind where one twin didn't get a fair share of placenta and is forever undersized. A few remind me of the child Claudia in "Interview With a Vampire," doomed to be a cherubic, golden-curled 6-year-old for eternity.

Now and then, when I realize with a jolt that I haven't heard from my sons in days, perhaps a few weeks, that they have truly grown up and left home and go about their busy days with little thought of me -- when I realize that they are never going to be children again -- I turn to the one still at home. And realize with an even greater jolt that she is almost 15, that she is going to grow up and leave and go about her days without me, too. And I want to reach back in time and hold the toddler, the 5-year-old, the child she once was.

This, I think, is the real motive here. Children are born to break our hearts. But My Twinn^TM will stay small, neat and silent forever -- better than photographs, better than videotape, better than memory, a "personalized home decor piece" for the dresser or mantel.

We can even do this for ourselves. There is now a version of Barbie you can customize to look like yourself. (Actually, like how you'd look if you had strangely flexed feet, missing ribs and a really long neck.) But the My Twinn^TM people were ahead of the game. I can order a doll that looks like I did once upon a time -- a doll that looks like the bright, fair-haired, hopeful girl I was in the photograph my mother kept beside her bed. I could have a doll made that looks like my mother did decades before I was born. If you want, you could buy Granny, now shrunken and white-haired and forgetting her own name, a doll of her child self to hug in the nursing home bed, a doll that looks just like she did long ago when all was well.

What I see in the heart of this is the frantic and utterly human urge to dam the river of time. Nothing more poignantly drives home to us that life does not hold still than children. They are dying and being born anew in front of us every day. They cannot be held, and so must be let go, like everyone we ever touch. So what I suddenly thought would be strange and wonderful indeed would be to get a My Twinn^TM doll that looked like my mother in her last good days before she died. I miss her quite a lot, even after all these years. Maybe, while I'm at it, I can get a miniature version of myself today, in the glory of my cellulite-ridden, stretch-marked 40s, to give my daughter for the future when she feels the same way.
SALON | Dec. 3, 1998