A Bop on the Head

[I wrote this for my mom for Mother's Day. I hope she doesn't mind if I share it here for everyone. She's a cool lady. Love ya mom!]

I think it was second grade. It was definitely at Uintah Elementary. Every week we would sit cross-legged in the common area near the library and a different parent would talk to us about their career. One dad was a surgeon, and he showed us how artificial hips were made. He poured some bluish, rubbery goo into a mold and all of us started hacking and gagging. There was an acrid, burning smell that lingered in the school for weeks.

My favorite parent demonstration was the week when mom showed up. She had a table lined up with all sorts of porcelain dolls and pickle heads, and a table with several molds and giant bottles of porcelain slip. All the girls, of course, loved the homemade outfits on the dolls. The boys were more interested in the plaster molds. Or, more specifically, the giant rubber bands that held the molds together. Where could we get our hands on rubber bands like that?

Mom taught us all about the process of making dolls, from pouring the porcelain to securing the wigs and eyeballs. The most dramatic part of the presentation came after mom poured the porcelain slip into the mold and let it set for a few minutes. She removed the giant rubber band (all of us eye-balling it, waiting for her to drop it on the floor), pulled the mold apart, and then delicately removed the little gray porcelain head.

Mom invited my friend Sidney up and told her to give the head a little “bop.” Sidney hesitated, but then did as mom instructed. She made a fist and lightly bopped the top of the doll head, and everyone gasped and squealed and laughed as the head broke into several pieces. Mom let us come up and feel the broken shards. They were cold and crumbled with the slightest pressure.

That was the first moment when I really appreciated the skill and difficulty involved in working with porcelain. I was amazed that my mother could create these dolls out of something so delicate.

For several years after that morning, even into junior high before we moved to Sun Valley, my classmates would bring up Mom’s presentation, and they would fondly recount that moment when with a gentle “bop” the perfect little porcelain head shattered into pieces.

I loved watching mom make her dolls. I loved the kilns and the basement shelves lined with plaster molds and the dismembered limbs and half-sewn bodies and little plastic cases with different sized eyeballs and tiny wigs in different colors and the hum of the sewing machine as half-naked dolls awaited their new outfits. I loved watching mom hold the doll heads as she painted eyebrows and gave color to their cheeks. I loved watching all the parts come together into these magnificent, perfectly-dressed dolls that looked like they could be auctioned at Sotheby’s.

Until I moved out, when friends would come to our house for the first time, the grand tour always included mom’s doll collection. It was impossible for any of my friends, even the ones pretending to be macho, to stand in front of the book case full of mini pickle-heads and not be amazed.

Shortly after I got married, I took up water-painting. I went to the art store, bought a bunch of paints and brushes and supplies (all on mom’s dime, I might add) and then started painting. I was OK. But the point isn’t whether or not I was good, it was that I had all the confidence in the world that if I wanted to be a painter, I could be a painter. How could I doubt it? I had grown up watching my mom turn globs of porcelain slip and scraps of fabric into porcelain doll masterpieces.

Even though I gave up on painting, I think most of my confidence continues to stem from growing up in a house with a mother always in the midst of learning and mastering new things. As I played in the basement on Woodland Drive, the heat would roll off the kilns and white dust form the plaster molds would stick to my fingers and my clothes. I would use slip bottles as towers and fortresses for my Transformers and I would use tufts of batting as snow. Mom’s creative process was everywhere. As I played throughout the house, little scraps of fabric and discarded thread would cling to my socks. I was always mindful not to disturb the porcelain body parts on the table and counters, or the miniature clothing patterns or the drying paint brushes. I never saw these things as “in the way.” They were a part of our home, part of our daily life. It’s hard to imagine growing up in a home without them.

The kilns and plaster molds are gone now, and I haven’t seen a bottle of slip in decades. But the memory of mom making her dolls will always stay with me. Whenever I see a porcelain doll in a store, I always think, “My mom could do that. But probably better.”