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Yukiko Hattori from Japan My mother seemed to be able to make dolls out of anything. She would make my two older sisters and me cornhusk dolls with golden corn-silk hair, rag dolls with shiny button eyes and yarn hair, eggshell dolls (as breakable as Humpty-Dumpty and even tiny matchstick dolls for our cardboard dollhouses. I enjoyed playing with them, but still, secretly, I yearned for a store-bought doll like the one our rich cousin had. Her doll had beautiful blonde curls, and it could open and close its blue glass eyes and even say "Mamma." I never stopped admiring it, but somehow I could not tell my parents that I also wanted that kind of doll. I knew, though vaguely, such dolls were a little too expensive for my parents to buy for all three of us.
They were real "store-bought" dolls, hard plastic dolls in princess-like fancy dresses and with wavy nylon hair. What more could I wish for? We each chose one and I named mine Misako. Soon my sisters and I became devoted mothers. Our "children" kept us busy all day. We gave them a bath, dressed them, brushed their hair, took them out for a walk and put them to bed. We thought up all sorts of things we could do with our dolls and tried everything. Several months later, they got more like real children--their faces and bodies became dirtier; their dresses got stained; their hair less smooth. I felt that Misako was closer to me than before because of these familiar changes.
One had lost one of her arms, and the other was one-legged. "You can take care of them if you want," my sisters said to me. Thus, I was unexpectedly promoted to being the luckier mother of three children instead of just one. They were more or less handicapped and they often looked to me as if they needed me to help them. I
enjoyed this feeling of being needed--being the
only one in the world who could protect them with a
lot of love. Indeed, they made the rest of my
childhood days very happy More about Yukiko's dolls: Finding My Dream Doll | Messengers of Friendship
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