Shopping is the best therapy

I’m sure I’m not alone as a parent in thinking that my kids are so wonderful that I’d like to get them anything they want, everything they want, in fact. And yet…what about the stuff that I wish they didn’t want?

Ella has been hankering for one of those big plastic Barbie sets, you know, the ones with all of the little plastic accessories that really HURT when they get crunched by a bare foot…the ones that look like a bunch of cheap pink plastic junk rather than some of those great toys that last forever that I wrote about in the article on KOA.

Well, I’ve been remembering, lately, a Christmastime when I was about six, and how my parents refused to get anything Barbie-ish other than the actual doll, telling me it was a lot of expensive and trendy junk that would never last. Remember the Barbie Country Camper? I remember it vividly. I wanted that Camper like nobody’s business. And I realized, as I was shopping this week, that I shouldn’t remember something like that vividly. Or, at least, my daughter shouldn't. What I'm recalling, of course, is not that Santa never brought the Barbie Country Camper, but the dismissiveness with which my father treated me desire for it.

I had these visions of Ella, 32 years down the road, complaining to some therapist about how her mom would stomp on her aesthetic sensibilities by refusing to get the pink plastic stuff she craved. So, right there in Toys Backwards-R Us tonight, I told my own good taste to hold its tongue (so to speak). I loaded into my cart the 2007 equivalent of the Barbie Country Camper: the Barbie Party Plane & Ship 2-in-1 Playset. With music! And lights! It all seemed so right.

And I bet, come Tuesday, that Ella will even let me play, too.