A work in progress

I'm taking a big chance. I'm showing you a work in progress. Were my mother alive and here, she'd be rolling her eyes and saying, "You know you never finish anything you start."

I do have a problem in that area, mostly because in the back of my mind I think, if I don't finish it, it's always got potential. Once I finish it, it might be lousy and that's that. But, unfinished, it still has a chance to be wonderful.

At any rate, this is going to be a doll house doll for the doll house several of the men in my life have promised to build me, but as yet none have delivered. My husband came closest when one winter when we would go to the high school's open shop night. We built the frame of a three-story Victorian, but choked when we got to the roof since it required beveling and a very scary saw. So now it holds a bunch of his old papers at our old house that has yet to be cleaned out.

Still, I persevere and yesterday sculpted this out of polymer clay. Turns out my oven doesn't go low enough to bake it, so now she awaits the purchase of a toaster oven. But am I daunted? Was my mother right after all?

Beats me. I haven't figured out anything about the body other than it's going to be cloth and stuffed. I still haven't decided whether to sculpt the upper arms and hands, just the hands or use cloth for both. I haven't the foggiest idea what I'm doing. I'm sure there are classes and books for this, but I tend to get too hung up on directions from other people and think I can't do something if I don't have exactly what they say I should have.

She has turned out older than what I was aiming for, but I decided I like her that way. Her story is already forming in my mind.

It's a sad story, though. She's had a hard life, what with marrying for convenience rather than love, failing at becoming a mother, and running a huge Victorian home on very little money. They live with her husband's ailing mother, the owner of the house and provider of most expenses, since the husband is not a great success in business, as the old lady never ceases to remind him. His father, she nags, was the great builder of the empire that now supports them all and junior cannot ever hope to fill his father's shoes. And he accepts that version, and it makes his wife sad and a little angry. But she has long since given up trying to bolster his ego after his mother is done with it. So she saves her strength for running her household on the meager amount alloted to her with very little help.

She wishes she lived in a world where a woman of her station could go out and get a job. But this is the 19th century and to work outside the home would be unthinkable for someone in her class. So at night she writes little stories that she sells to a small publisher under a nom de plume. Even though she is exhausted, this at least gives her money that she stashes away, just in case her mother-in-law dies and her husband grows a backbone. Then she will reveal her savings to him and they will travel together and, maybe, she'll fall in love with him.

Or maybe he'll die.

Her name is Eleanor.