Blog #4 Option 4

Trying to Achieve the Doll Expectation 

Growing up in a small town, I saw little diversity. Everyone looked pretty much the same. After reading Sharon Taylors, My First Black Barbie, I can recall a time in my childhood where I too, “felt like an ugly duckling” (Raylor 179). It was in the third grade when I started to realize that I was “bigger” than the other girls in my class. We were trying on outfits for our winter school dance and when my teacher handed out our uniforms I instantly panicked. I took the outfit home after school and slipped it on. Jean shorts and a tight white tank top. I stood in the mirror and began to tear up. I asked myself why I couldn’t look like the other girls in my class. I wondered to myself, what could I have done to deserve this body? After staring at myself for hours, picking out my imperfections and trying to see the good, I still couldn’t look at myself with satisfaction.

Weeks went by and my mother noticed how scared I was for the dance. She asked me if I knew the lyrics and the steps and I broke down. My mother was in awe. I was her “wild child” her talkative, troublemaking, and people pleaser. I was her child that could stand up in front of a crowed and joke until everyone cried.

My mother told me that there is more to someone then their looks and that I had a personality so unique that I shouldn’t let “being bigger” get in the way of that.

A week before the show it was time to celebrate my birthday. At my parties the tradition was my mother to give me her gift last. I always liked how we saved the best for last. I opened it up and it was a “Just Like You” American Girl Doll. She didn’t look anything like me. Her skin was flawless, her hair perfect and belly flat. I smiled and felt again, ashamed. I went on to dance in front of my entire school and felt humiliated.

Sharon and I grew up believing that we “had to beautiful to be fully accepted” by our peers. Sharon’s “blackness” was my “fatness.” Sharon was able to realize that she had to define her “own standards of beauty and acceptance regardless of the dominating perception” (Raylor 185). But for me this wasn’t enough. I wanted to make a change. I wanted to actually resemble my “Just like me Doll.”  

When I went in for my physical in 7^th grade my doctor told me that my weight was “unacceptable.” I can still hear those words today and my stomach drops. Not only were my peers unaccepting of how I looked but my doctor too. I told my mother I wanted to change. I wanted to be healthy and most importantly to me, accepted. She feared my intentions and recommended signing up for a camp that would help me get into shape healthily.

The camp was three weeks long. We biked over twenty miles a day while food almost seemed scarce. I began to realize early on that everyone there seemed to be a bit ashamed of his or her appearance. We all banned together and worked through the tough weeks. I started to see changes instantly. My face began to thin out and my body lost its chub. When it was time to go home I knew something had changed. I looked in the mirror and felt like my American Girl Doll.

When I landed back in Chicago, my grandpa didn’t recognize me. I walked towards him off the plane and he didn’t even flinch. I nudged him wondering if he was just getting older and didn’t recognize me. When he finally realized his granddaughter was standing right in front of him, he was in awe and announced to what it felt like the whole airport, “Annie! Where is the other half of you!”

During that year I lost over twenty pounds. I kept on trying to re shape my identity so I felt comfortable in my own skin. Now, looking back at my childhood pictures I laugh and joke but also remember the pain that being below a certain standard felt.

Sharon Raylor and I are similar and different in many ways. What we both were unaware of when we were younger was “the self hate that those cruel children also felt. It was simply a scapegoat for not knowing to deal with their own rejection and alienation” (Raylor 184).  I didn’t understand as a child that the outside isn’t the only thing that makes up a person. Kids my age were also struggling with problems that couldn’t be called out cause they laid within. Sharon was able to “get to know her own difference” while I tried to change who I was in order to feel accepted.

I look back on my journey and am truly ashamed of how I looked at my self each morning, disgust. In society today many girls try to be something they aren’t and try and alter what they were born with. They lighten their skin, hair or go to extremes in order to seek results that satisfy them.

My American Girl Doll, like Raylors Barbie, was not just a doll. It was a standard. A standard that I dedicated many years of my earlier years as a teen too.

Reading Taylors story I am hopeful. Knowing that dolls are going on the shelves of stores all around the nation that aren’t your “average American girl” gives me a feeling of relief. Different varieties of dolls could really change the way young girls perceive themselves.