(For before & afters of the rooms, see dropdowns under the Reveal tab in the navigation).

As a child who was sort of hyper-concerned with morality, and being “good,” I always looked forward to the ‘moral of the story.’ At the end of the fairy tale or teachable fable, I longed for completion and that all-wise voice coming in to explain all the nuances and why things had to happen in a certain way to reveal this secret layer – the moral.

When I started this project, I was trying to literally see through walls to the remnants of my mother, the house’s architect. I was trying desperately to decipher her once and for all from what she left behind. As always, I wanted to learn from her, and the last lessons would be ones after death. This had a pleasing circularity – the cycle of birth and death and there being a closing of some kind. As a writer of now two novels, I yearned for symmetry and an ending. But after she died there was no closing. There was only her, Sally, stopped, my hand in hers. No more chapters, no more morals. Just, The End.

With the dollhouse restoration, I think I tried to create an ending I could live with, my own moral of the story. I’d been raised by an extraordinary woman, but a cipher. I stumbled into the dollhouse and found a conjure house, an enchanted prism that scrambled the decades and pleated them accordion style until all the years seemed visible all at once.

Look inside and see yourself at age ten, and your mother much younger than you are now; look again and you are a teen, mocking these walls, or again and you are there, in 2020, with all the echoes of your past informing every change you make.

But, the layers of time wouldn’t stay stable – they kept rearranging. Because I kept on living and she kept on being dead.

Only now, in 2022, am I navigating toward an ending – which is: my beginning.

A wise woman told me that perhaps, inside the dollhouse that I so lovingly restored, I was, in effect, a willing captive.

It was like pushing aside blinders on a horse, so that the fullness of the world suddenly appeared peripherally, not just straight on.

And I saw myself within the house as a doll child, wandering the tiny prison, free to endlessly circle my 7 or 8 rooms, an environment I can never escape. There I am perpetually on view by the eyes of twin parental gods, behaving for them, trying to be good, to win their love. And I suddenly thought…oh my GOD could the dollhouse project actually have real benefit for me – could it reflect a deep reality of my life to which I’d been blind? Was I psychologically sitting there in Alcatraz actually making a model of Alcatraz? I wonder if I have this upside down. Maybe in looking for my mother, I was really supposed to find myself all along.

This is the last section of the story. It’s where my stubborn childhood soul is supposed to make meaning while the stubborn adult labored over tiny books, as unknowing as a child, driven unconsciously to do it, not knowing why.

Dollhouses are fairy tale houses. If you reduce your own life to fairy tale scale, what do you have? A hero or heroine. A quest. Challenges. Wicked evil usually shows up and must be vanquished.  There’s often a curse. And this is mine –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby