Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 10



“I Don’t Wanna Play House”

“I Don’t Wanna Play House” was, of course, one of Tammy’s big hits during her golden year, 1968. The abandoned-wife narrator of this song laments at hearing her daughter proclaim to a playmate, “I don’t wanna play house,” because she’s seen her parents play it and it doesn’t look like much fun.

And those who find Tammy to be a bit “too much” are apt to point to this one as such, along with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” It’s all a tad too pathetic, a little too suburban and domestic, a little too manipulative of the audience, showing the harsh realities of a marriage from the viewpoint of the little kids.

But it perhaps could be an anthem of my generation, as well as the one before us. Not Tammy’s narrative in the song, but that of the daughter she quotes. We’re the little kids who’ve seen the marital wreckage of yesteryear and declared it unsuitable for ourselves. We see Tammy’s expressions of suffering and reject them. We are too smart and too strong to be like her. We don’t want or need a man—or any mate—in the same way women of her generation did. It is entirely different for us.

Because, you see, relationships between men and women have completely evolved into something that does not resemble Tammy’s experience in the slightest. If you are a smart, modern woman, you will certainly never muffle your sobs into a pile of laundry, or spend a whole day worrying about the cold expression on your husband’s face when he left for work that morning, or hear your four-year-old echo back at you some frustrated utterance that makes you realize how miserable you must sound to the rest of the world. No, our generation is too enlightened to ever be so domestically dysfunctional as all of that.

And I believe I thought this once. I was indeed a child for having that thought—or at least incredibly naive. To think one could love and marry and maybe start a family and never feel any of these sorts of things that Tammy always sings about so pitifully and so beautifully.

I really was a brat to think that once. “I don’t want to play house.” To think I could have everything I want and not have to play at all. A really clueless, insufferable brat, playing entirely outside of the house.



—Tammyland