In the wake of Barbie’s revival, Kat Macdonald reflects on her yearning for the girlhood she never had
BY KAT MACDONALD, IMAGE BY WARNER BROS
What I wish I could tell you:
I played with Barbies / I had sleepovers with friends / my mum taught me how to do makeup / I got to wear braids in my hair / I wore skirts to school / I planned my dream wedding / I had the perfect parents / I got to find out I was gay after several awkward relationships with men / I was a daddy’s girl
What I can tell you (truthfully):
My parents bought Action Men as a child and I had to make do / I wasn’t allowed to have my friend who were girls stay over / I learnt how to do makeup from my ex-partner / I was forced to have my hair short / I wore trousers and ill-fitting shirts to school / we didn’t really talk about weddings or getting married / my parents were flawed / I kind of always knew my attraction to girls was different but struggled to unpack it / I was a lonely child
With the second coming of Barbie, I have seen a lot more mourning around the lost girlhoods from other trans-feminine people. I felt it too, although lessened somewhat by the company of a particularly handsome Ken, so I wanted to look at what we can take from this and try to unpack the myth of a lost girlhood somewhere in the process.
A few years ago, prompted by the haunting tones of Phoebe Bridgers, I would find myself crying myself to sleep, lusting and desperate for a childhood I never had, a movie stereotype girlhood, where everything played out like a YA teen romance set in Anywhere town America. This went on for a period of months while I processed the loss of something that was not really there. It was only when I noticed that this particular fantasy childhood somehow always took place in America, that I noticed something interesting. Now I travelled a lot as a child and didn’t spend a great deal of time in the UK but beyond a holiday to Disney, that never included travelling to America. So why was it always an American fantasy of girlhood?
Having grown up an only/lonely child, I didn’t get to see many examples of the standard girlhood growing up. Moving from place to place, my childhood was a little more solitary, so my ideas of the differences between my own childhood and that of other girls, was limited to the world of tv and movies. Having spoken to friends who lived through their own girlhood, the experience was quite different. Some of the small details were the same but the realization I hit upon was thus: the idea of a girlhood itself is a fictionalized utopia from which I (and possibly others) could pretend my own, honestly shitty, childhood didn’t have to happen.
So I was mourning my own Lady Bird (2017) childhood. Arguing with my mum and seeking rebellion and freedom from systems far less constricting than the ones that entangled me. Being loved but ultimately misunderstood by my parents and exhausted by their expectations of my life. In my fantasy, I was my very own Saoirse Ronan, complete with American accent, set in Sacramento, with maybe only a hint more lesbianism (and honestly a hint, that film really is queer-coded).
We escape into these dreams because it’s comforting to imagine an easier childhood. So many of us grew up having to hide, spending our teenage years and even further than that, suppressing who we really were due to having our own femininity crushed by oppressive expectations. We hold up these ideals of a childhood where we felt loved and accepted, however, the sadder truth is that if our family was this fantasy version of supportive, it wouldn’t have mattered how we were born and we wouldn’t have had to hide from them. The grass simply seems greener on the other side.
Speaking to my friends who lived through their own girlhoods, this fantasy crumbles even faster. Many of them having had eerily similar experiences to my own, changed only by the constrictions being sited as to why they couldn’t live their own authentic truth. That’s what Barbie (2023) stoked. A dream version of childhood where they got to live supported, loved and allowed to flourish, outside of the patriarchal archetypes and constrictions.
This isn’t to diminish that feeling of loss my sisters and siblings felt, echoing this yearning for a girlhood they never got to have. My aim here is more to help rationalize why we feel this deep sense of loss and how we can move on from that feeling.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s just me who dreams of girlhood in California, but I have a hunch most of my sister’s girlhoods go something similar. If you look closely enough they are fictionalised in a way that we were given the very things we lacked in our childhoods. Be it stable support, unconditional love or safety, if I look back at my own, it wouldn’t have mattered if I was assigned a boy or girl at birth, my childhood would have played out mostly the same.
Recently I’ve been grieving more than a concept, my Nana (Grandma in Scots). Her girlhood definitely didn’t fit the standards I have for what I would have wanted and left her with similar deep, complicated wounds. I wonder if she would have mourned her own chance of a happy childhood in the same way I am here. She was beautiful though, a stunner, having had many link the song Pretty Woman, a Roy Orbison classic, to her high cheekbones and big doey eyes. When the Order of Service was printed I got many a comment that she looked just like me when she was younger, the ultimate compliment.
Visiting her in the hospital, and interacting with family who invalidated my identity with their memories of who they thought I was and should have been, was tough. There was a woman in the bed next to her though, beautiful at 90 something and when I came in on day two of my three days of visiting time, she perked up. “You are gorgeous.” I responded with a blushed thanks and when she asked me who the woman next to her was to me and I informed her it was, in fact, my grandmother, she remarked “She must be proud to have such a beautiful granddaughter” and I crumbled. Because in that moment and to this random stranger, my experiences of childhood didn’t matter, even in relation to my family. My absence of the girlhood I so sorely begged for meant nothing, because ultimately, it means nothing, despite what others’ expectations may impose on you. Weeks later I would see this moment’s reflection somewhat in the now-famous Barbie bus stop scene and cry even harder.
All mourning is the act of holding an idealized version of something in your mind and your heart. Moving past that stage is realizing that things are often far more complicated than the glimpse of it we or others may remember. So instead of fantasising about a life I never had and never could have, letting its absence only purpose be to invalidate my own womanhood, I’ll choose to reframe my own reality.
So instead I’ll tell you:
I loved Pokemon as a child / I spent time with friends and never placed expectations on them regardless of gender / with the help of youtube and the people around me, I learn how to do makeup that helped me feel more comfortable in myself / I grew my hair out every chance I got / I wore an uncomfortable school uniform the same as all the other kids / I never spent much time considering if I would get married and still don’t / I had such wonderful role models around me as I came into my womanhood / I got to claim my sexuality far more defiantly than most / I had my own girlhood, and it was uniquely mine.
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