2008 THIRD PLACE: Entry fee Category

 

You Don't Need a Real Cabbage Patch Doll

By Sheryl Platte

 

I was walking through the toy aisle the other day with my young boys and had a mini-stroke as I passed the 25^th Anniversary Cabbage Patch Doll. I was a member of the generation of little girls that looked at the first Cabbage Patch Dolls in the JC Penney Christmas catalog. I was pretty sure one wasn't going to be under my Christmas tree, partly because my mother said they were ugly with their fat cheeks and yarn hair and partly because my father kept quoting all the things he could do with the $40.00 and more that he heard people paying for such a homely doll. They both assured me: "You don't need a real Cabbage Patch Doll."

 

And I didn't get one. Christmas morning I opened up a Cabbage Patch branded doll swing, doll clothes, diapers and even a Cabbage Patch baby carrier. With just one gift left for me in a tell tale shaped box, I was sure it was my blond headed, yellow yarned Cabbage Patch Doll. I was feeling a halo over my head.

 

I was stunned my mother had gotten passed her ugly doll face claim. My dad must have given up cigarettes for months to buy this thing for me. The customary taking turns opening gifts was etching years off my six-year-old life as I waited for my little brother to finish opening his stinking stuffed Papa Smurf. Just my dad was left. And he sure took his time opening socks. SOCKS. Finally, he shoved the doll box across the carpet to me and my already ample heap of toys.

 

As I ripped the paper open, there was no yellow and green box. There were no adoption papers, and it actually wasn't even blond, it had brown hair. My mother took her cue and intuitively prevented me from saying "What the hell is this?" on Christmas morning by chirping: "It's a Story Book Kid! She comes with her own story book!" This doll was a definite and deliberate cousin to the too expensive, too hard to find and apparently too ugly Cabbage Patch doll.

 

I knew better than to act crushed. At some point that morning my mother offered "See, this one is better." I was sure she was dead wrong because when I would get together with my best friend, I could probably lie through losing the adoption papers but when we pulled down the diapers to compare Xavier stamps, my baby doll's unblemished bottom couldn't lie.

 

When I got together with my friend, she hadn't received a Cabbage Patch Doll either. What she got was worse- a homemade Cabbage Patch that was truly ugly. It was really bad. But we still played with the dolls. We still hooked them up to toy sewing machines that were heart monitors, went to them for comfort from dumb brothers and the evils of school girls and of course shoved them in to our overnight bags for campouts on each other's bedroom floor. The dolls weren't authentic, but the memories sure were.

 

As a writer we can sit around with a library of books, a fancy laptop, in a cozy coffee shop, living the dream we've read about. We can write stories that look great and may very well even tell a story with perfect language, character descriptions, dialogue and all the things we learned getting degrees in writing. But most of those things don't promise authenticity.  More often than not, our favorite authors and stories are loved because of their realism, the way we could identify when the same thing happened to us. Or a writer dreams up something we wished we had thought of. Their style, their tone, their words are authentic.

 

My mother was right. I didn't need a real Cabbage Patch Doll. I don't need a top notch computer and I don't need to finish reading all the books I know all great writers should have read. I don't even need some Dean of English Arts to stamp a degree to prove I can write. I simply need to be authentic to my thoughts, my voice, my memories. I wasn't able to write this while sipping coffee, but instead I clunked at it with a broken Enter key on my keyboard while savoring the taste of a red Tootsie Roll pop. It isn't what I read about but it's authentic.