What Barbie Taught Me About Trying to Fit In

My father drove me to the toy store. Maybe that’s why the purchase was memorable. Mother time streamed by, punctuated by moods — hers and mine — that hung around like stubborn weather systems. But Dad time was an event. I was on my best behavior because I knew he would rather be doing other things. Of course, my mother had things she too would rather have been doing than driving me to the dentist, or clothes shopping or — especially — shoe shopping, which was always painful. I had wide square feet that didn’t fit into the styles my friends wore. It took forever to settle on a pair that fit but weren’t too ugly, with the discarded options arrayed around us in boxes lined with tissue paper. My mother complained that she did all the hard stuff and my father got outsized credit for the few tasks he picked up. For me he was sort of like Ryan Gosling’s Ken: nice to have around but not as essential as my mother was. <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/what-barbie-taught-me-about-trying-to-fit-in-b2a111687dc5">Read More</a>