I grew up poor. I didn’t have much: I had a quilt my great-grandmother made me, a white plastic toddler bed that I used from the ages of three to eight, Goodwill clothes, and, aside from a few other toys, two dolls. First there was a green Rainbow Brite doll I simply called Green Baby. Because of poverty, we moved often, from apartment to apartment, mobile home to mobile home. Green Baby, who I can only vaguely recall as having messy hair and a grass and daffodil color scheme, was my one constant in these early childhood upheavals.
We lost Green Baby in the tide of human movement.
I was a devastated toddler. Green Baby was my daughter. I was her parent. How could I just lose her to the world (how could my mother lose me to the world)? I grieved for her, really grieved.
I have a few deeply-set memories of my mother’s kindness that I wish were not painful. I am still fond of oranges because they remind me of a time when she and I shared oranges one afternoon before my sister was born. I am reaching back really far into my memory, but what I can recall is orange peel under my finger nails, and intentionally squeezing the fruit out onto my wrists like perfume-- something I do on occasion today, not for the scent, but to keep that memory alive. Another very kind thing my mother did for me was to give me Charlie.

She was a Cabbage Patch Kid with no hair, pale, sallow skin, and dark brown eyes whose name I could not pronounce. So I called her Charlie. I dressed her up in the clothes that I had come home from the hospital in. I cradled her to me and tucked her in my bed at night.
I don’t remember what sort of scenarios I dreamt up for Green Baby and myself. Play is an important part of a child’s development, and I was lucky to be naturally inclined towards play and narrativization. As a child I would tell myself stories about ant mounds, tiny political sagas involving inhospitable worlds and duelling queens. I would imagine a copy of myself running along the road beside our car, trapezing across power lines and jumping over the moon. Floods figured prominently in my stories. Raindrops were subject to characterization.
Charlie was the first toy I had that I can remember making up or enacting stories for and with. For a long time, I was fascinated by the story of Moses. I would bring this story to life by wrapping myself in a scarf and placing Charlie in a frayed wicker basket my mother had brought home from her job as a portrait photographer and setting her adrift across the living room carpet Nile, as if I was Jochebed. Charlie was Moses, facing the perils of hippos and crocodiles. I would become Miriam, then Pharoah’s daughter, then Jochebed again. Then, with Charlie safe in her basket, I would become Moses myself, and animatedly part a Red Sea that only I could see.

Through play, I found liberation from the troubled circumstances of my parents' finances and broken, often abusive relationship. Through play, I also sought to understand the reality of the world that I was born into. My mother had, as far as I can recall, one tattoo until after she split from my father. It was a blue rose, something that later became significant to me for other reasons. I decided that since my mother had a tattoo, Charlie should have one, too, so I gave her a similar one with a Sharpie. Eventually Charlie had a whole sleeve of Sharpie and ballpoint pen tattoos, though I cannot remember what, specifically, I drew on her.
Did I mean for Charlie to be my daughter, or a stand-in for my increasingly angry mother? At some point, as I got older and my sister came into the picture, I stopped playing with Charlie and started simply holding or hugging her instead. Whenever I felt alone or upset, I would try to bottle up the worst of my feelings (I have never been good at hiding when I am upset, but have always been terrible at clarifying it) and wait until night, when I could crawl into my bed and simply hold Charlie, and be afraid without fear.

When my sister was a toddler, my mother also got her a Cabbage Patch Kid. This one had a tuft of blonde hair, and green eyes, and a warmer complexion. I think the doll’s name was originally Noreen, but I’m not sure, and I cannot remember what my sister chose to call it instead. I remember being profoundly disappointed that my sister did not seem to take to her doll as well as I had to mine. She didn’t dislike her Doll, but she didn’t play with her the way I had played with my Charlie. It was maybe the first time I realized that you can be related to someone and be different from them, and once I started seeing differences between how my sister and I approached play, I started seeing differences between my family members and I everywhere.
I don’t think I was a quiet child by any means, but I think I quieted parts of myself after noticing these things. I was vocal about my interests, but not about what I actually thought; I was vocal about my needs, but not about what I actually wanted. And Charlie, whom I kept throughout my childhood and who may very well still be sitting in a house in Texas, having survived two intercontinental moves and a teenage runaway, served as a kind of physical talisman of that fundamental schism. Through her and the play I engaged in as a young child, I could say without saying what was on my mind, but I could never state it clearly. Or I could record what I observed around me, but never assign meaning to it, only feeling. When I grew much older and traded dolls for video games and football, I was still unable to let go of Charlie. She represented where I had stored my ability to be emotionally vulnerable, I, a kid who was always pretty vulnerable to the cycle of abuse that eventually swept me up. And when I eventually parted my own Red Sea and crossed over into a desert of my own making, I left Charlie, safe in her basket, behind.
