In the spirit of full disclosure, I feel compelled to add this incident to my recent list of failures: Yesterday morning, I played “Crazy Barbies” with a five year old.
I had stayed overnight with my nieces and was not even finished drinking my coffee when one of the very small humans cornered me and asked me to play “Crazy Barbies” with them.
The evening before I had already pushed her off by saying, “I don’t want to play Crazy Barbies right now, but I would draw with you or read a book, would you like to do that?” She’d been receptive, definitely, and we’d spent a lot of time coloring together and talking about how mad she gets at her sisters sometimes. Her sisters knocked over her Magnetile structure and made her cry. Cool. I could relate. My sister made me go to the evil bookstore the other day!
But the next morning she asked again. I didn’t want to play Barbies, but I did want to spend time with my niece. I love her and she rarely gets me alone.
And the game had potential: How crazy were these ladies going to be? What kind of dark and twisted things would pop out of my niece’s mouth? And let’s be honest, I was pretty happy that there was likely going to be a moment where I could explain that it wasn’t nice to call people with mental health issues “crazy.”
I was first given a Barbie that looked like the blond-haired-tiptoed doll I’d grown up playing with. She looked new: her hair was still brushed and shiny. My niece rethought that, and immediately took the Barbie for herself and handed me a different doll which I was told was “cooler.”
I don’t know if she was trying to trick me, but this new doll wasn’t a Barbie, and she definitely didn’t look cooler, just creepier. She had huge eyes and a non-human shaped face. Also, I think she was dressed like a fancy mermaid. Probably because she was crazy high. Maybe her eyes were dilated from too much coke.
The game started with the dolls dancing for 10 seconds in the Barbie Dream house. Let me remind you, this game is called Crazy Barbies, so my expectations were kind of heightened; but as far as I could tell, the dancing was pretty tame. I’d say that the real life kitchen dance party with we’d had that morning was at least 10 times as crazy. In the Barbie Dance Party, no limbs were flailing or heads were bobbing. The Barbies just kind of swayed side to side stiffly.
I thought about suggesting that the dolls drink too much chocolate milk and get crazy on sugar, but before I could even find the Barbie dream kitchen, I was instructed that the dolls were going to the ocean where they were going to “learn their lesson”. At this point, my younger nieces joined in.
Surely these children were too young to pretend the dolls were high or drunk and carelessly swimming in the ocean. Surely there would be no physical attacks and, likely, no mental breaks. But kids can be kind of warped sometimes, so I held tight.
“Do they go in without a lifeguard?” I asked.
Blank stares.
“Sharks in the water?”
Blank…
“I don’t understand what they’re doing,” I said.
“They’re learning their lesson,” my niece insisted.
It turns out that meant: They dive into the water and swirl around and then get scores. There was no definition of what made a good dive, but it was clear my dilated-pupil “Barbie” was not allowed to get the best score.
It was also clear about two minutes in that I wanted to stop this horrible game. My exit plan was to outsmart the small children.
I started out scoring the dolls as threes and fours, thinking once they earned a perfect 10, they could go home. Not so fast. Apparently there was no scale of achievement. I’m pretty sure their final dives were worth 240 points.
I was in a no-win situation where the Barbie’s diving scores were expected to be in order: Hers, Mine, Her Younger sisters. There was a possibly-acceptable-sometimes deviation of her sisters beating me. I didn’t want her to think she always got to win, but I also didn’t want to make her cry, mostly because I feared it would necessitate a reset.
We played and played, and then I got a phone call that interrupted us. My niece just stared at me for seven minutes until I hung up. When I rejoined the Barbies were still at the goddamn beach.
“It’s time for them to go home,” my niece said, finally. And all the Barbies loaded onto a stool even though there was a Barbie Dream Van right there.
At home the Barbies danced the same stiff dance again and then the game was over.
“What the fuck?” I wanted to say “I don’t understand this crazy game. Where was the crazy? What was the lesson? What are they learning their lesson for? What happened that made them learn their lesson? How does their behavior change?”
I tried to prod for answers using kid appropriate language, but my niece was uncrackable.
Of all my boundary setting failures this month, this is maybe the most fascinating and pathetic. There was absolutely a power dynamic, but it was weighted in my direction. I could have easily said, “No.” I didn’t because I didn’t want to disappoint the kid, I guess, and because I didn’t want her mom to think I wasn’t being awesome.
About five seconds of reflection reveals that my socialized-female need to please was in full force. But there’s something more upsetting: it was such a missed opportunity. I adore giving impromptu unsolicited advice to kids about consent. I torture my children daily by destroying perfectly mindless television shows, tickle wars and board games. They are nonstop flooded with diatribes about media representations of boundary crossing and coached about opportunities to set boundaries. Here I could have talked to my niece about one of the most important nuances of consent: compromise.
But I didn’t.
I’m was so confused and bored during the entire ordeal that I never thought about saying to her, “I am happy to play Barbies with you, but how about they solve a mystery?” Never once did I give her the opportunity to work through with me that I wanted to play with her, and I was even willing to play with the toys she wanted, but I wanted to be allowed to determine the rules with her. I could have been explicit with her and said, “Sometimes you want to be with a friend and make them happy so you compromise. You let them pick the game, but then you get to say if there are parts of the game you want to change or add. You both get to do it together. You have to respect each other’s choices. No one is wrong or right.”
I didn’t say any of that, I just gritted my teeth until she declared that the Barbies should get in the car and go home. And I did that, I think, because I agreed to do something I didn’t want to and then I just turned off and shut down, like I’ve trained myself to do, until it’s over. Apparently, even with a five year old. Sure, I had some escape plans, but once they failed, I just submitted.
I’m not saying I shouldn’t have played Barbies with the kid even though I was bored to tears. I’m saying a) I should have played with her and used it as an opportunity to help her make it a better experience for me too and b) I can’t ignore the fact that what drove me to say yes was an actual feeling inside me that I would be failing as an aunt and an overall disappointment as a kind-human, if I rejected the child of a person I cared about.
The pressure was not around standing up for myself against a five year old, but a reticence to draw boundaries with a child which could potentially upset another adult who was not even there to witness it.
It terrifies me a little how deeply engrained certain feelings and behaviors can be.
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