The Barn, The Box, and Barbie's Legs

We're moving. Eighteen years on this farm. Which means the barn has to be dealt with.

I have to go through everything and decide what comes with us, what's given away, sold or trashed. That sounded manageable when I said it out loud three weeks ago. Touch everything, make a decision, move on. I am a person who makes decisions. I can sort a barn.

What I did not account for is that a box is not just a box.

I work my way through the barn methodically. Ruthlessly, even. Broken things, out. Duplicates, out. The pile grows and I feel good about it, efficient, like someone who has their life together. And then I open a box and stop.

Horses. Plastic horses. In every size apparently available to the Norwegian toy market in the early 2000s. Big ones, small ones, one missing a leg. And at the bottom, wedged between a palomino and something that might be a unicorn:

Barbie. And her horse.

I stand in the barn and I don't move for a while.

Because I am not in the barn anymore. I am in my kitchen in Bergen, and it is over 20 years ago, and the youngest is three. Dinner is on the stove. I have just started my own company, just started, ink barely dry, figuring it out as I go, and there is a customer on the phone, tucked between my ear and my shoulder, because that is how you do it when the children are small and the business is new and dinner still has to happen.

I am holding everything together. Barely, but still.

Then she comes in. Three years old. Furious.

"Barbie won't sit on the horse."

I look at Barbie. I look at the horse. Barbies legs only go forward and backward. That's it. That is the full range of motion. Barbie was not designed with equestrian ambitions in mind and my daughter has just discovered this and she is absolutely not okay about it.

I try to help. But Barbie will not spread her legs and the child is furious and the customer is waiting and the pan is on the heat and I look at this small fierce person in my kitchen doorway and I feel — everything. The exhaustion and the love and the chaos and the absurdity of it all. I tell the customer: there is a situation. I'll call back.

The customer laughs. I call back. The dinner doesn't burn.

That three year old is grown now.

This is what nobody warns you about when you move. It's not the packing. It's the time travel. You're standing in a barn one minute and the next you're back inside a moment that is gone — not just the moment but the whole world it belonged to. The kitchen. The chaos. The smallness of them. The way they needed you for everything, including the structural limitations of Barbie's hip joints.

You would give anything to go back for an afternoon. You wouldn't change a thing, not even the hard parts. Especially not the hard parts.

I have been ruthless about a lot of it. Things that meant nothing, out. I am moving to a new life and I don't need to drag everything with me.

But this is not nothing.

Barbie and the horse goes back in the box.

It's coming with me.

Speaking of touching everything and deciding what comes with you into the next chapter, that's basically what my book is about. Minus the plastic horses. Mostly. Screw the Script — grab it here.