When I was young, I loved Barbies. Now, mind you, I still played in the mud with those Barbies but I loved my dolls. In the 80’s, everyone had to have a Barbie house in order to be cool. Some had the Barbie apartment with the elevator. But everyone wanted the Barbie DREAM HOUSE. I wanted that Barbie Dream House like nobody’s business. I wanted to be cool. But my parents kept saying no. Even my grandparents said no.

And then, one blessed birthday, I didn’t get the Barbie Dream House. I got the motherload of all Barbie Dream House dreams. You see, instead of a plastic and cardboard BRIGHT PINK piece of crap that cost way too much, my grandfather took the painstaking time to make me a real… WOODEN… DREAM house. It was fashioned after the pink version but it bore our house number. The roof was shingled with old mini-blinds. The chimmney was hand-painted with bricks. And inside? Grandma had wallpapered walls. She carpeted the floors. She made a bed. And there was a toilet. And a whole kitchen set. Up on the roof there was a balcony.

I was the envy of everyone. And I loved that house. I played with Barbies much longer than anyone else my age because, hello, wouldn’t you if you had a house that stylin’? But push came to shove and soon I was involved in other things and my little brother took control of the playroom. It wasn’t long before the Barbie Mansion was carpetless, drawn on and basically abandoned.

When TheHusbandMan and I bought our home last year, my Dad brought the doll house on the back of his truck. It’s been sitting in one of our storage rooms in the basement since it got here over eighteen months ago.

And yesterday, I cried all over it.

Yes, I’m throwing a pity party over a doll house that no one will play with ever again. Okay, it’s true. I could and should fix it up for Munchkin to play with when she visits. But it hurts, really. For she’ll never be able to wake up in the middle of the night, sneak down to the playroom and play for many uninterrupted hours with the house and her dolls. No one will do that in my house either. (Because, while most of our toys thus far have been gender neutral, BigBrother prefers a tractor and a ball over ANYTHING, including his beloved fire doggie that he snuggles with t night.) And I will fix it up, because it’s the right thing to do.

But my heart is broken.

I wanted to share it with a daughter. Instead, my only daughter lives too far away to get any really good mileage out of the house. I refuse to sell it or loan it to anyone because of the hours of love and devotion that were poured into it by my grandparents. And so it’s just a reminder, every time I need to go into the back storage room to find something, it looms in the corner:

“Someone could already be playing with me but you screwed up. Now I sit here, collect dust and waste away. You won’t get to pass me on. You failed. You failed.”

You wouldn’t think a doll house could say so much, right? Apparently it has some attitude.

A friend of mine tried to console me by saying that someday my granddaughters can play with the doll house. I’m sure that’s what TheHusbandMan’s paternal grandmother thought she could do with her daughter’s toys after that daughter was killed in an auto accident at 16… that someday her granddaughter could play with it…. and then she probably thought, well, then my great-granddaughter.

I’m a failure all over the place.

Maybe we’ll make it into an Army battle station?

For those worrying that I’m not excited about LittleBrother, I assure you that you’re wrong. We’ve got new bedding picked out and a game plan for creating the new nursery. I’m excited to rewash all of BigBrother’s clothing and go find an appropriate hospital picture outfit. I’m glad my boys will have that brother bond that my dad and his brothers have.

But I’m trying to let go of some hopes and dreams that I had. As that same friend said, it’s akin to how an adoptive parent has to mourn the loss of the biological child that they’ll never birth. Instead, I had a little girl and I screwed everything up. So, not only is there some mourning going on but a whole lotta self anger.

Wholelotta.

(View the doll house tag at flickr for a few more shots, complete with notes on the photographs. Labeling these has brought me out of a funk a little bit and very thankful for my grandparents, no?)