The Appealing, Appalling Ideal of Toy Limitation
My husband and I are not minimalists, especially when it comes to certain categories of belongings, like books (oh, the books) and kitchen equipment. Like a lot of people, we rent a storage space that we are forever desperately trying to empty. Yet, as my daughter learned to extend her hand and grasp, I found that I prized her natural interest in individual objects more than I’d expected. Her regard seemed so pure. At 6 months, she would hold a single sprig of thyme from a garden plant, or a leaf from a tree, for 10 or 15 minutes, testing its properties of smell, taste, and feel. At 8 months, she adopted her shampoo tube, gnawing at its flat, crimped end; we decided there was no need to give her any other bath toys. At 10 months, she began to favor a particular small stuffed tabby cat, crowing with satisfaction whenever she saw it.
It’s been goddamn cute, and I’ve watched it with a pre-emptive sadness, thinking of the inevitable plastic juggernaut my friends have warned me about, rolling toward her. As a child, reading the Little House on the Prairie books, I envied Laura and Mary’s joy in the single orange in their Christmas stocking or the doll Laura finally got after years of cuddling a corncob in a handkerchief. I felt that joy was lost to me. I had no fewer than five Cabbage Patch Kids—who had, in turn, too many clothes to count. (Pity my parents, who worked to buy me all those toys I definitely wanted.) J.—a person too young to have accumulated layers of forgotten belongings in closets and plastic tubs—still has that old-time joy. More and more, I wanted to honor it by making the physical world around her legible, minimal, and beautiful.