Dollar Store Doll

I am watching the Netflix series Maid which features a young woman who flees a relationship in which her boyfriend never actually hits her but has frightened her for a long time, so she leaves with their three year old daughter because he puts his fist through the wall just to the side of her head, she puts her daughter in her car seat, drives frantically away, and then her daughter throws her Dollar Store doll out the window and the woman stops on the side of an incredibly busy road, leaves her daughter in the car, and runs back to look for the Dollar Store doll in the dark which she finds but in pieces and as she turns back she sees a car swerve from the highway into the car where her daughter is waiting for her doll, and from there everything deteriorates.

I remember being a mother who would pull over on a busy highway to look for a Dollar Store doll because I would have thought that would make what was happening normal. That is how people think when their lives are scrambled and they don’t trust their own judgement anymore. You have no time for patience, no time to buy another doll, you have to pull over right now no matter how much traffic there is or how dark or how impossible it will be to find the Dollar Store doll in one piece. You have to make something stop hurting. I understand Maid although I never cleaned houses for a living.

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Photo by Sigrid Wu on Unsplash