The dollhouse

Good morning,

You have no idea how difficult this post is to write, to flesh these feelings.  Yesterday, while taking a break from cleaning mouse plopped herself to down to see what was going on in the blogoshere.  There, she stumbled upon Little Butterfly's post.  LB mused about how she enjoyed being in her Daddy/little girl dynamic.  Now mouse's dynamic with Daddy is different, mouse is all woman.  Instead she calls him Daddy because of the warm feelings he gives her.  To mouse he is Daddy, someone that protects and unconditionally loves his girl.  It feels so right.

We'll just as a little girl mouse, grew up quickly.  There was no real childhood, no time spent daydreaming about the future, mouse was always worried too much about the present.  Even then she wanted a dollhouse of her own.  As a child mouse dressed much more grown-up than her peers -- she wanted to grow up quickly because that meant not being where she was anymore.  The interests were not in girly things but more adult ones.

Music.

Always there a safe haven where mouse could muse about the lyrics she heard through the two stereophonic speakers.  Sometimes she'd listen to the same song over and over.  Delving deeply into its secret message until she was in tears.

When it was time for mouse to grow up, she did very willingly moved out on her own younger than her peers and made some bad choices.  Alpha was a bad choice but she was running away, mostly from her past.

Haight-Ashbury Painted Ladies

Inside Alpha's home was a dollhouse, a replica of an old Victorian row house in San Francisco.  A beautiful painted lady of a dollhouse that mouse was instantly drawn to.   Can't even begin to say how many hours mouse spent canvassing hobby shops, antique shows and the like, scouring for the perfect miniature claw-foot tub.  Or a swath of wallpaper.  Don't get mouse started on finding the perfect Tiffany lamp that actually worked!  It was a labor of love and mouse would become lost inside that dollhouse.  Maybe it was about reclaiming a lost childhood, or creating her own world where she was surrounded by lots of love, something she scarcely felt in her own real world.  At first Alpha found it amusing, but later after he became ill...not sure but maybe he became jealous of the perfect world mouse had created -- a world where he was shut out of; he forbid mouse to touch it ever again and she didn't.  Wouldn't even clean or dust it.  It just sat unfinished like so many things in her life.

When she was told to leave his house, she left it behind and never saw it again.

Over the years mouse has thought about that dollhouse but kept those thoughts very private.   It's silly to get so emotional about a dollhouse but that dollhouse represented something special to mouse, something lost.  Something she desperately wanted and needed and like so many things never got.   The truth was she was drawn to that house and maybe like Velveteen Rabbit, if she loved it enough it could become real.  A special place where nothing could touch her or do her harm.  A home with a family that loved her.  Sometimes late at night mouse will think about it, wonder what happened and where it ended up. Hopefully it ended up in good hands and not in a landfill somewhere.  For now, she likes to believe it was a wonderful gift for another little girl who needed to dream that one day the ground would stop shaking