Opinion

Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer, a reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and an editorial fellow at Community Change.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, instead of the Barbie townhouse of my dreams, I got something I didn’t want from someone I didn’t want to be around: my father.

He built a makeshift dollhouse for me out of a dresser drawer in the wood shop at the county jail.

My father was physically abusive to my mother, me and my siblings, and seemed to enjoy mentally tormenting us, too. He was also a drug addict and thief, and frequently ran into trouble with the law. We hadn’t lived in our house long — we never lived in any house long — but the police in our Pennsylvania town had already been there several times, including occasions when my father assaulted my mother (again) and locked me and my siblings in a closet while he went to a bar.

I’m not sure exactly what he was jailed for at the time he made the dollhouse. It’s possible, in a sadistic twist, that he made this “gift” while he was incarcerated for abusing me.

Barbie was the doll all the other girls had. And at that point in my life, I desperately wanted to be like all the other girls.

My family usually struggled to scrape up enough money for food and electricity, so Barbie dolls were a luxury we couldn’t afford. Any type of toy at all would be considered a precious treasure. On rare occasions, my mother managed to buy the knockoff “fashion dolls” with names like Tanya or Jeanie that you could get at Woolworth’s or the S.S. Kresge five-and-dime stores.

The fact that I didn’t own any Barbie dolls didn’t stop me from wanting the fancy house she called home. I was a girl with a vivid imagination in the prime dollhouse age range in the 1970s when Mattel introduced the first townhouse version of the Barbie Dreamhouse. It had three stories and six rooms — one of which featured a well-stocked bookshelf (and a cat!) on a painted background. It also had a working elevator so Barbie could glide up and down between the levels of her home, taking in the sights from behind the yellow plastic waist-high door with a heart cutout in the lattice.

Visions of that Dreamhouse — and of all the tales I could bring to life within its plastic walls — consumed me. Even though my brain knew it was impossible, my tender heart held out a tiny hope for a miracle. That wouldn’t last long.

The creation my father made was a rectangular open-faced box that still looked like a dresser drawer. There was one piece of wood going down the middle vertically, and a horizontal divider across the middle of each side, so it had four “rooms.” The rooms were bare but had contact paper of assorted patterns stuck to the backside as makeshift wallpaper. There were no stairs, doors or windows.

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I can’t recall whether he sent the dollhouse home while he was still in custody or brought it home himself. I do remember feeling suspicious. Experience had taught me to always be leery of my father. He never did anything for selfless reasons. Maybe working in the jailhouse wood shop spared him from some other, less desirable assignment. Or maybe he was trying to score points with the staff or other inmates by acting like a devoted dad.

I despised my father — and, by extension, ought to have hated whatever he made. But the dollhouse was the only thing he would ever give me, aside, of course, from literal and metaphorical scars. And even a poorly executed dollhouse of tainted origin was better than no dollhouse at all.

I was still trying to sort out my confused feelings about it when the city condemned our house. The dollhouse wasn’t among the few things we were able to remove before deputies padlocked the doors.

A few weeks later, we had relocated to another house about a mile away and I told my brother, who was a couple of years older, that I wished I could retrieve the dollhouse. Always up for an adventure, he offered to lead the way.

Arriving at our now-former home, we managed to pry open a basement window barely large enough for our thin frames to squeeze through and made our way inside. The dollhouse was on the second floor, and the route we had to navigate was treacherous. The windows had been boarded up, and the power was disconnected, so we were in near-total darkness. Some of the stairs and large chunks of the flooring in the upstairs hall were missing — but we had steered around those hazards in daylight, so we knew the way.

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We located the dollhouse and took it out the back door — which wasn’t padlocked, just locked from the inside — and my brother carried it all the way home. Once we had retrieved the dollhouse, though, my mixed feelings about it returned. I’m not sure how much I played with it, if at all, after that, but when we moved again a short time later, it didn’t come along.

As with many of my other childhood memories, I had banished this one to the vault that trauma survivors often maintain for their own mental well-being.

This summer, amid the “Barbie” movie publicity deluge, HGTV launched “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge,” a four-part series in which eight pairs of TV personalities (mostly from the network’s home renovation shows) are each assigned one section of a Southern California home they must transform into a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse. Watching the series stirred powerful memories of an unwanted dollhouse I had long forgotten.

As I watched the show’s participants brainstorm creative design plans and cool ideas for “toyetic” features and then bring them to life in a space someone could actually inhabit, I thought about one of the guiding principles in my adult life: Your past doesn’t define you. You get to write your next chapter — and are free to pursue your dreams.

My father died long ago, and my mother died last year, having never achieved her dream of homeownership. But I own the home where I have lived for more than 25 years. It’s a fixer-upper still not quite fully fixed up. It doesn’t have an elevator, or a cat, but it does have more than one fully stocked bookshelf. Most important, it’s a place where, I hope, my children have felt loved and safe. Which makes it my real-life dreamhouse.