Calico Critters

It is the summer of the Calico Critters. Gone are the days when the children demanded our attention the second we woke up, demanded our attention even before we woke up. Now they hide out in their rooms playing with their animal families until hunger drives them out in search of breakfast. If the long stretches of Calico Critter play were dashes, and the dips in our tiny swimming pool were dots, our days could be read in Morse Code. And what would the message be? This is summer. This is childhood. This is joy.

As with anything, there are bumps in the road. Dee Dee and Clayton inevitably clash at least once during the day. Most recently, both ended up in tears because Dee Dee had insisted on making a rabbit fly, a magical feat to which Clayton had strongly objected.

“Momma,” he asked me seriously later, “when you play with Calico Critters, is it supposed to be realistic?” Clayton is so determined to follow the rules, he looks out for the ‘supposed to’ no matter what he’s doing.

“You can play with them however you want,” I responded.

“Yeah, but are they supposed to be realistic?” he insisted.

“Well, they are animals that wear clothes,” I said, and we both laughed.

“I need a job,” Clayton told me dejectedly two weeks ago. He was sitting at the kitchen table, browsing the Calico Critter website and looking discouraged.

“Why?” I asked.

“I really want the Hopscotch Rabbit Family and I don’t have enough money in my piggy bank.”

In general, I am a proponent of my kids not getting everything they want (although I do find it hard not to spoil them, hence the Calico Critter double stroller I secretly ordered for them on Amazon). But at that moment I was cleaning blinds, with the prospect of scrubbing all the doors in the house still before me.

“I’ll pay you to clean the doors,” I offered.

“Okay!”

For two days, Clayton stood on a stool with a sponge in hand and a bucket of soapy water at his feet. He scrubbed and scrubbed until his hands were sore and the doors gleamed.

“I feel like a servant,” he said happily. It was the first time I had really witnessed his work ethic. If I found a spot he had missed, he didn’t complain. He just soaked the sponge and went at it again. He did the math endlessly: “If I’ve cleaned eight doors and I need to clean twelve, that means... I just have four to go!”

If the objects of my children’s imaginative play were something else--army men, or transformers, or cars-- I think I would still look on it tenderly, but I doubt that it would wring my heart in quite the same way.

“Come on, Mom!” Clayton tells me. “I’ve got to show you something.” And then he leads me by the hand to the dollhouse, showing me how all the Calico Mommas are sitting on the couch, nursing their babies, or how Momma Dog is giving her son an especially sweet hug. Other times, he and his sisters load all their families up in a little car, those who don’t fit trailing behind on foot or in the double stroller, and then, here they come, out for a drive through the living room. My throat aches with the sweetness of it.

And then, of course, there is this: I have a seven-year-old son who would rather play Calico Critters than just about anything else. The dollhouse, a gift from Santa Claus several years ago, is in the girls’ room, but it is Clayton who sets it up so carefully, tucking the babies into their cribs, arranging the grown-ups around the table or on the couch. It used to be only Clayton’s room I had to worry about when we had other kids at the house; he lives in fear that his carefully arranged toys will be “messed up.” But now I see him keeping an eye on the doll house, too, and as soon as the guests are gone, he races to set it up again.

When we were at my parents’ house at the beginning of the summer, my mother ordered each of my children a Calico Critter family for them to keep in Florida, to play with in the old dollhouse my sister and I had as kids. Clayton’s family arrived in the mail a day or two later than the girls’; he spent the interim in barely contained excitement.

“My Calico Critters are coming today!” he told me as soon as he woke up on the day of their arrival.

But by the time his dog family arrived in the mail, so had his older, out-of-town cousins, both boys. He tore open the brown packaging eagerly, but as soon as the Calico Critter box was revealed, he immediately put it in his sister’s hands. The box was edged with pink, with a border of pastel-colored flowers. It looked, in a word, too girly; Clayton didn’t want his cousins to see him claim it.

In our family, we have a lot of conversations about marketing, gender marketing in particular. Years ago I read the book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, which offers an insightful, critical look at the ways the culture of childhood has become increasingly gendered. Fresh in my mind is the “Aha!” moment I had when I read how simple the marketing ploy is that lies behind it. A ball is just a ball, and yet make one ball blue, for boys, and another pink, for girls, and you have engineered demand where there was none: girls can’t play with just any old ball, they need a new ball for girls.

These days I worry less about how the girlie-girl culture will “eat” my girls and more about how the strict gender delineations of toys impacts my son. What makes an animal family something for only girls to play with? Aren’t men part of families? Aren’t boys? Clayton has yet to ask,“Are Calico Critters just for girls, Mom?” and yet I feel the dreaded question there, lurking in the background.

I have suggested to Clayton several times that we invite a friend from school over to play, but he has been reluctant. “I just want to stay at home and play Calico Critters with my sisters,” he has told me more than once. That’s all he has said, but I am afraid that he feels that having a boy at the house would cramp his style, would make him feel that he has to disavow the dollhouse and his beloved critter families.

There is another conversation I think we need to have. The Calico Critter families are meant to be old-fashioned, with their suspenders and their aprons and their, well, calico. And they are old-fashioned. As we scroll through the dozens of families available on the Calico Critter website (the kids already have their wish-lists for birthdays and Christmas), it is glaringly obvious to me. While no one would deny that the “traditional” family in America is changing (a Pew Research Center analysis in 2014 stated that fewer than half of American children live with two heterosexual parents in their first marriage), it is clear that the paradigm of the traditional family persists in our children’s toys, and thus, I would argue, in their worldview. Until kids see alternative families populating their world of toys and books, they will continue to see such real-life families as oddities.

Equally dangerous, if not more so, is the way such a strict definition of family limits both their imaginative play and, ultimately, the way they imagine their future lives. Remember the uproar when Teen Talk Barbie said, ‘Math class is tough!’? No one wants a toy to prescribe the sphere or the scope of their children’s dreams. And I, for one, don’t want my children to get the not-so-subtle message from their toys that a family must be headed only by a mom and a dad. Because who knows what kind of family they themselves will one day want? It’s one thing to tell my kids that they can marry anyone they want, boy or girl, but how much do those words mean when not one of the families with which they spend hours playing gives any weight to that assertion? When I finish this, I think I’ll write a letter to Calico Critters and politely suggest that they get with the times.

Still, one thing is for sure: all stereotypes die hard. The other day Clayton rushed from where they were playing Calico Critters to find me in the kitchen.

“Momma!” he told me excitedly, “the Calico Critter moms are having a mom’s night out at the beauty shop! You know, they’re getting covered in mud! With pickles on their eyes and stuff!”

Ah, the epitome of feminine pampering: pickles on our eyes and stuff!