WHEN THE DOLL BREAKS
Theresa Karminski Burke
I remember meeting Marita my freshman year in college. She was cute,
like a cheerleader, and had the same dynamic, enthusiastic "rah rah" personality.
Marita had boundless energy. She was fun to be around and had a self-assured
style. At the same time, she was still very much a little girl. She missed
her parents, made frequent phone calls to her siblings, and had a roomful
of cherished childhood dolls carefully displayed on her bed pillows and
bookshelves.
The first night we met, Marita told me she would remember my name because
Theresa was the name of her favorite doll, now a priceless antique. It
had been passed down from her great-great-grandmother and was given to
Marita when she was a little girl. Marita handed me the doll, a porcelain
collector's dream, gussied up in an ivory silk dress and intricate lace
pantaloons. Marita and I became friends instantly and used to share library
activities like "scoping" for cute guys behind bookshelves.
One night at a drunken fraternity party, Marita found herself having
sex with her boyfriend. The details were quite foggy. She didn't remember
taking her clothes off, but woke up naked next to the young sophomore.
When Marita discovered she was pregnant, she had an abortion immediately
and never told a soul, except her boyfriend and her roommate.
When Marita told me about her abortion years later, she explained that
her roommate Ruth had taken her to the clinic. Ruth had an abortion as
a senior in high school and told Marita it was no big deal. Abortion was
common on campus. Lots of girls had them.
After the abortion, Marita's personality changed. She became irritable
and began drinking all the time. She skipped classes on a regular basis,
preferring to sleep in and snooze off each hung-over depression. Her attitude
was cynical and negative, and she wasn't much fun to be around. At that
time, I didn't understand what Marita was going through. But there were
signs.
One night we gathered at Marita's dorm for a party. We were drinking
beers when Marita's boyfriend jumped up and shouted, "It's time for Baby
Soccer!" There was a grand applause, reminiscent of the inauguration of
gladiator games. Marita brought out several doll heads which had been decapitated
from their torsos, rolling them along with her hockey stick for the grand
entrance. Everyone started kicking the baby heads around the room in a
frenzy of glee and hysterics. They all cheered while gulping drinks and
devouring chips.
As the pastime continued, the aggression toward the baby heads became
more severe. One girl picked up a doll head and started gouging out its
eyes with a dart. Everyone cackled with delight. Ruth began ripping out
shreds of another doll's hair while burning its plastic cheeks with her
cigarette. This sparked her boyfriend's imagination. He grabbed another
doll from the shelf and put the hot ember of his cigarette between the
doll's legs, then ripped them off, leaving only a melted and scarred-looking
vagina hole. Ruth threw her doll head on the floor, stamping hard on its
skull. They continued to kick the baby heads around the room in a hostile
display of rage fused with amusement.
I learned that this had become a favorite game in the dorm. My reaction
to this symbolic abuse was a sickening feeling in my stomach. I witnessed
this traumatic play, unaware at the time of the psychic release of collective
tension this game was providing. Desensitized to the authenticity of the
game, I laughed along with the others, silently recalling all the "baby
in a blender" jokes which proliferated among my friends.
As I picked up one of the doll heads, I was overcome with a vague familiarity.
My heart skipped a beat when I identified the doll as "Theresa," the porcelain
antique which had once been Marita's prized possession. Her face was cracked,
smashed, and splintered, a jigsaw of fractured pieces-nearly unrecognizable.
Where the head had been torn from the body there were razor-sharp claws
of fragmented china.
Suddenly I felt a genuine, aching grief. I feared that at any minute
I might burst into tears. What had happened to this doll "Theresa," passed
down through generations of female history within Marita's family? How
did this happen? What had happened to my friend?
The trauma was still very much a mystery to me-but I knew that something
inside Marita had also been crushed. The desecration was reflected quite
ostensibly in the face of her broken doll. I waited nearly a decade to
discover the answer to my questions. Learning that Marita had suffered
an abortion made everything crystal clear.
*****
Those who study childhood trauma have documented many examples where
children work through a traumatic event by recreating aspects of their
trauma through playful games, stories and art. Child therapists will often
observe children playing with puppets and doll houses to get a sense of
what is going on in their minds and families. It can be easier to express
an emotional conflict by acting it out through a puppet figure--rather
than putting oneself through subjective introspection.
As with my classmates and the game of "Baby Soccer," adults too can
engage in symbolic reenactment of a trauma under the disguise of games,
art, music, humor, and other amusements. This type of play provided an
outlet for grief by replacing it with socially acceptable acts of "baby
hatred."
Marita's battered doll reflected the abuse of a little girl-ravaged,
disfigured, assaulted and burned. "Baby Soccer" was a sadistic "acting
out" of unconscious repressed abortion trauma. A baby haunting her unconscious
had become the target to be annihilated. Her battered doll's head was a
symbol of this conflict.
It is no surprise that this traumatic play so quickly became an amusement
for all to enjoy. Like Marita, many of the young women and men drawn into
this game had also lost children to abortion. Many others had lost sisters
or brothers to abortion. "Baby Soccer" provided a symbolic means to mock,
belittle, and display mastery over the babies who were never allowed to
be born but who still haunted their memories.
As the group's enthusiasm for this game demonstrated, the acting out
of post-abortion trauma can be contagious. This is especially the case
when so many have had a direct experience with abortion. Worse, this attempt
to belittle and master babies through play reinforced and internalized
attitudes and behaviors of aggression and hostility against babies.
If the college authorities had seen students beating up and defacing
an effigy of a black person, or a symbol of Jewish heritage, would they
not have felt compelled to intervene against this frightful and shocking
symbolism? But what is said about the intolerance and contempt displayed
for babies? It is unlikely that there will ever be a word uttered.
Collective guilt and trauma have the capacity to disguise massive injustice.
The offensiveness of "Baby Soccer" was made socially acceptable because
it concealed this display of aggression behind the mask of a "humorously
irreverent" diversion, so everyone laughed.
We have all learned to snicker at sick jokes and engage in scapegoating
because these things give us momentary relief from the tension of unsettled
issues. In this case, we were laughing with the nervous giggle of an entire
culture that has been traumatized by the abortion of tens of millions of
babies. The sheer magnitude of it all is too much to grasp. So it must
be trivialized, reduced to laughter and scorn, or else we will all be crushed
by the horror of it all.
That is why the belittling of children is all around us. Themes of abortion-related
guilt, rage and anger are pervasive in modern music, art and films. "Evil
child" movies, like Alien and The Omen, reflect the demonization
of children. The "evil baby" is our worst nightmare--something society
must destroy before it destroys us.
This is just one of many ways that our culture has been ravaged by the
haunting memory of aborted children. Far too many women and men have tried
to contain and control this horror through aggression and the rejection
of nurturing instincts. They have allowed life-giving, tender, and loving
ways to be replaced with mockery, violence, and destruction.
These are the truths recorded for all to see in the broken face of Marita's
cherished doll. It was a shattered face. It was the mirror image of Marita's
own fractured self.
Theresa Karminski Burke, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist,
author of Rachel's Vineyard, and director of The Center For Post
Abortion Healing, P.O. Box 195, Bridgeport, PA 19405, (610) 626-4006. This
article is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Forbidden Grief.
Copyright 1997 Theresa Karminski Burke.
Originally printed in The Post-Abortion Review, 6(1), Winter 1988.
Copyright 1988, Elliot Institute.
see also Abortion Trauma and Child Abuse
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