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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.
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