Last week I went Christmas shopping for my 7-year-old niece. Her mom and my mom had list of things she wanted from American Girl, (which is, in case you haven’t heard, “a premiere lifestyle brand that offers a variety of age- appropriate, high-quality dolls, books, clothing, and accessories”), a marketing tsunami so huge that it has a flagship store on Fifth Avenue, across from Saks.
I am not a big shopper. I avoid Fifth Ave like the plague, and American Girl, with its semi-educational historical message, insanely high prices, and brilliantly aspirational never-enough-stuff genius merchandising is EXACTLY the kind of consumerism that makes me most uncomfortable. But I love my niece, my mom and sister-in-law couldn’t make it into Manhattan, and it made sense for me to do the shopping.

The store is a marvel. Multistoried, clearly laid out, enticingly displayed – the merch even features dolls that a child can buy that are styled just like themselves, with dozens of choices of hair and eye color.
Rows of dolls, with their sightless unblinking eyes behind little plastic ovals, dolls in historic dioramas matching their “story,” dolls in glass cases  . . . the whole place more than creeped me out. You can take your doll to tea for $33 a head, you can get her hair styled – and your hair, too!
I bought what was on the list. I rode the escalator down while the iTunes in my head played Tom Petty: “She was an American girl, raised on pro-o-mises. . .” (not much control on that mental iTunes randomplay, alas).
Then I decided to do what I could to throw away my preconceptions for the moment. Recognize my likes and dislikes, see my aversion and attachment, see the filters for what they are, and just be present. What was really here? I settled down to breathe, be present, and open up.
Hit like a freight train, I was, as I watched the mothers and their daughters, grandmothers, mothers, kids,  the flood of femininity, old and young. And I knew the one thing I couldn’t pick up at American Girl.
A daughter.
No little girl to dress up for me, no little version of myself and my husband. We don’t have any kids, and we are over 40. There are no kids promised for us, not anymore. It was all I could do not to burst out bawling on the escalator.
What a great opportunity for practice! I decided to just be present with the emotion, not breathe it out, or distract myself; just be there with it. No one is going to point out tears in midtown at lunchtime. I figured I’d just walk with it, my emotion and me, to the F train back to the office, and see what developed.
First thought, “What an ass I am. If I hadn’t spent all that money on freakin’ yoga school and meditation retreats we might have had enough cash to adopt. No way we can come up with $15,000-$25,000 now.  J– and L– spent $25K + to bring N– from Vietnam. I’m a spendthrift fool.”
And I walked with that. How bizarre. What was coming up next? Hmm, exactly WHOSE desire is this? My husband and I had made peace with our childlessness and what to do about it some time ago. Neither of us is so wedded to our DNA that we would go to incredible medical lengths to recombine it. Neither of us is too comfortable with the current state of the adoption market – ’cause a market it is. We decided to accept it and be the best aunt and uncle we could.
How weird that the desire for a “little me” to dress up should hit me in the middle of the American Girl store. Where every single aspect of the experience is designed to make a shopper want exactly that.
How very not-so-weird at all.
The artificial stimulation of desire is what our interdependent marketplace is all about. And how much more powerful when the desires stimulated are  the very basics of human existence: sex, food, reproduction. Everything can become a commodity, even children.
So practice worked. I could be with the emotion, and feel it, and see the swirls of color that made it up: my ego, human nature, and interdependent response to my environment. I got a little insight. And it’s okay. It is what it is, and isn’t it always, anyway?
We are American girls, raised on promises. Promises of a family, of Barbie and American Girl, of career success, of total fulfillment – take your pick.
Like Tom Petty sang:
“Well, she was an American girl,
Raised on promises
She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there
Was a little more to life
Somewhere else
After all it was a great big world
With lots of places to run to . . .”
I didn’t need to run. Just be on the escalator. And breathe. And watch.
(Hey, there’s an escalator in another excellent Tom Petty video, too, that takes place in that icon of American consumerism, the shopping mall. . . . Oh. there goes the presence. Again.)