Forever young

The appeal of My Twinn dolls is not that they let parents hang on to their kids' childhood. It's that they let kids hang on to their childhood.

By Joan Walsh

Dec 22, 1998 | | I admit it: I'm one of those nutty mothers Sallie Tisdale wondered about in her column on My Twinn -- the outrageously expensive, customized look-alike doll being hyped this holiday season. Yes, I bought a My Twinn for my daughter, Nora, who's almost 9. Reluctant, repulsed, incredulous, I bought it anyway, because she wanted it so much, and I wanted to understand why.

Her father is horrified. Nora is ecstatic and grateful. I'm embarrassed and confused. But Tisdale misses something crucial if she thinks My Twinn is about moms wanting to hold on to their babies, to fix them eternally as adorable children. That's certainly part of My Twinn's appeal -- but to our kids, not us.

Nora likes dolls, but she's all tomboy. Even when she became a fan of the ultra-femme Spice Girls, her favorite was the tomboy, Sporty Spice. Dressed up (which is rarely) she looks a little like one of the Twinn dolls' apparent models, JonBenet Ramsey -- on steroids. Not quite 9, she's 4 foot 11 and 110 pounds. Green-eyed, blond-haired, with a perfect bow mouth and a spray of freckles across her nose, she's quite beautiful when she deigns to comb her hair, wash her face and wear something besides oversize blue jeans and a San Francisco Giants T-shirt. Actually, she's beautiful to me in anything she wears, but her refusal to primp means she's left out of the ongoing third-grade beauty pageant/fashion show that seems to occupy so much of the time of her peers, the kind of girls Tisdale assumes My Twinn was created for. So I was shocked when Nora brought me the My Twinn catalog, holding it reverently, pleadingly, like a map to a buried treasure. "I want this, Mommy." She knew how much it cost. "It can be my only present, Mommy." I looked through the catalog at the little girls with their little clone dolls, and I wondered if someone had cloned my daughter and snatched the real one, because what would Nora want with these scary talismans of feminine narcissism?

But Nora isn't the only tomboy I know who wants a Twinn. A friend's niece, a 10-year-old who wears boys' underwear and has never owned a doll, asked for the one with the matching midnight blue dress and headband with roses. And a boy I know wistfully turned down the page with the only boy Twinn doll and told his mom he wanted one, too. What's with these Twinns? Maybe it's that our kids can sense their childhoods are fleeting, too. The children I know who crave Twinns are around 9, reaching the end of a kind of innocence, hurtling toward the sharp cliff of adolescence, their bodies morphing toward adulthood. Just this year Nora has developed a long neck, a waist (read: hips) and the hint -- is it babyfat? -- of budding breasts. This Christmas seems much more charged for her, generally. She's savoring everything about it, not just the idea she'll get her Twinn, because I think she knows this is one of the last years she'll be able to enjoy it all uncritically. The tree, the lights, my mother's crhche; she's taking it all in ecstatically, knowing she still doesn't have to grapple with Jesus, or even with being half-Jewish.

With so many choices of costumes for her Twinn -- ski clothes, gingham dresses -- which doll did Nora pick? The JonBenet Ramsey look-alike, of course. And she wanted the matching cranberry velour dress, even though she hasn't worn a dress since my brother got married over two years ago, and that was under protest. I tried to push her, a little, toward the My Twinn action wear -- ski sweaters, or the blue-jean overalls that used to be her uniform. She refused. And I caved in, frankly loving the idea I wouldn't have to force her into a dress this Christmas.