One of the Many Times In Which I Feel Like A Horrible Parent

I have this doll.  She has a pink dress and blue string hair.  She has teardrop-shaped eyes and half of one has been rubbed off.  Her hands are clasped together around a flower.  There are several mildew stains on her dress now.  I got this doll in South Korea in 1987.

She has been living in our bedroom.  We don’t have much in the way of bedroom furniture yet and we still have a couple of unpacked boxes on the floor (and if it weren’t for Dragonborn being released last week I would have taken care of those yesterday) so sometimes she sits on top of our dresser and sometimes she gets knocked to the floor by the mountain of clothes that needs to be put away.

On Sunday Lily looked at me and said, “Thank you for the doll, Mama!”

I was confused.  We hadn’t been toy shopping recently and I had already given her all my old stuffed animals and some other toys from my youth.  “What doll, sweetie?”

“The doll with the blue hair.”

I got that feeling you get when you realize something is horribly wrong and all the hair stands up on the back of your neck.  “I didn’t give you that doll,” I frowned.

“Yes you did,” Lily said, her eyes wide and lip just starting to quiver.

“You did.  You were half asleep,” Husband said.

I have zero recollection of this.  We had taken a nap earlier that day.  I’m not one for talking in my sleep.  Usually I’m somewhat of a light sleeper.  Everything just felt weird and wrong at that moment.  So I had to tell my sweet little daughter who is almost four and has the biggest, saddest, bluest eyes ever that Mama did not mean to transfer ownership of the Korea Doll to her in her sleep.  And that was when Lily burst into tears and my heart broke into a million pieces.

One day I will give her that doll.  In the meantime we compromised by letting the doll live in Lily’s room on a high shelf with all her other special (breakable, easily lost) things.  But you can’t tell a four-year-old that some dolls are not for playing with.