Full of What Now?

When I was growing up, my adoptive mother sold collectible dolls out of our house…Madame Alexander dolls for the most part.  Each year, my sister and I would get a “StoryLand” doll that would sit on shelves in our room, never to be played with.  There was Cinderella, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, Little Bo Peep..etc.  I still have those dolls stored up in our attic.  Not sure why.  My daughter never really liked dolls, except for the occasional Barbie doll.  And my son, while he’d play with the Barbies with her, was more interested in arts and crafts than anything else.   My fiance tells me that I should chuck them…that it might make me feel better and also somewhat vindicated about the way I was treated as a child.  But there’s still that nagging guilty feeling that she’d know.  That one day, she’s say, “Hey, still got those dolls?  Can I see them to make sure you haven’t chucked them?”.  Sigh.

We built the house I grew up in when I was 2 and a half.  My parents asked my sister and I what colors we wanted for our rooms.  As a toddler, I chose pink.  My sister, four years older, chose purple.  My room had a pink shag rug (no judging, this was back in the 70’s), pink curtains, pink lamp, pink wallpaper with pink stripes and pink flowers, pink light switch cover.  Name a piece of furniture in any bedroom in America and I can guarantee you that in my room, I had that furniture in a screaming shade of pink.  My sister had the same thing..in purple…down to the purple wallpaper with purple stripes and purple flowers. 

And like I said, we had those collectible dolls on the pink (or in the case of my sister, purple) shelves that our father hand painted according to my mother’s wishes.

Along with the StoryLand dolls, we had others that were strictly for decoration.  Have you ever heard the following poem?

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

This rhyme was first recorded in A. E. Bray's Traditions of Devonshire (Volume II, pp. 287–288)[2] in 1838 and was collected by James Orchard Halliwell in the mid-nineteenth century.[1] The tradition of fortune telling by days of birth is much older. Thomas Nashe recalled stories told to "yong folks" in Suffolk in the 1570s which included "tell[ing] what luck eurie one should have by the day of the weeke he was borne on". Nashe thus provides evidence for fortune telling rhymes of this type circulating in Suffolk in the 1570s. – From Wikipedia

There was a doll for each day of the week, and my mother gave us each one for the top of our bureaus, on top of the pink or purple runner next to the pink or purple lamp. 

My sister was given the Monday’s Child doll.  Her birthday was on a Monday, obviously.

  

I had the Tuesday’s Child doll.  You’d assume that I was born on a Tuesday, right?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  Until a few years ago when I searched for the day of the week on which my birthday fell.

Who is shocked to know that I’m not Tuesday’s child at all?  Well, the fact that I trip walking around the house in bare feet should have lead to the assumption that I was never “full of grace”…

I’m Wednesday’s child...."full of woe".  I haven’t worked up the nerve to ask my adoptive mother why she didn’t give me the correct doll.  I have a feeling it was simply because Tuesday’s Child had brown hair and Wednesday’s Child had blonde. 

Regardless of the hair color, it’s just one more truth that was kept from me.  And one more inaccuracy in my life that I deal with.