#a 45-year-old woman and her cabbage patch doll

[trollprincess]

Let me explain to you all why this is the greatest fucking day of my life.

First, I’ll explain what that doll is, for anyone too young to know what it is. That is a Cabbage Patch Doll. It’s not like a regular baby Cabbage Patch Doll, it’s some special sort of Cabbage Patch Doll that really doesn’t matter. What matters is who had it all this time. Cabbage Patch Dolls were *incredibly* popular around 1983-1986 or so, to the point where if you go on YT and search for them, you can very easily find news footage of adults going bugfuck in stores trying to get one of these for their kids.

The important thing is not what it is, or even what type it is. It’s WHO had it.

So I was about six or seven when these got big. I had a cousin Erica a year younger, and another cousin Danielle a year younger than that. And naturally we ALL wanted Cabbage Patch Dolls. At the very least, I know I eventually got one. And I did what every kid did with theirs. I loved it into the fucking ground. I played with it, I got it dirty, my grandma made it little outfits. I’m sure my cousins got theirs as well, since our grandma spoiled us all and they were only children, so either our grandma or their parents more than likely got them one.

BUT.

Aunt Phyllis was our great-aunt. She wasn’t married, she had no kids, so we were used to Aunt Phyllis giving us whatever we wanted. And we weren’t bad kids or greedy kids, we didn’t ask for anything extravagant. Aunt Phyllis took us for car rides and played old novelty songs like “The Streak�� and “My Ding-a-Ling” and bought us ice cream. She was fun.

But she has always been one of those people who gets caught up in “this collectible will be worth something someday.” Beanie Babies, DVDs, etc. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she’d always find some to spend on those sorts of things. At one point in recent years, she had several iPads because she would buy the newest version but keep the old one, and then use one for email and another for Facebook and another for games and another for Kindle.

Anyway, when you’re six, you don’t understand “this collectible will be worth something in the future.” You understand Aunt Phyllis loves you, and always gets you stuff, and never says no.

So one day I go over to her house for a sleepover (we would stay in the twin beds in her room and we’d watch “Misfits of Science”) and I see THEM. *Six* Cabbage Patch Dolls. SIX. Two newborns and four regular Cabbage Patch Dolls, all set up and displayed on a table at the top of the stairs. (In front of a large window where they’d get a lot of sun and fade and depreciate, but I didn’t even think about that until years later.) Six Cabbage Patch Dolls, at a time when so many people could hardly get ONE.

I looked up at my great-aunt who gave me anything and asked in awe, “Can I have one?”

And my aunt looked back and said, “No.”

She also told me I couldn’t touch them. In fact, none of us could touch them. We were just supposed to ignore them. And I mean … I was six. Erica was five, Danielle was four. Are you serious? I can’t even look at them?

And, like, part of it was they sold these things as babies. They were *real*. They came with birth certificates and everything. So leaving them sitting there in the box all alone with no one to play with them … it made me sad. It made me sad for YEARS. I would occasionally be reminded of Cabbage Patch Dolls, and every time I did I thought of those lonely dolls sitting in Aunt Phyllis’s house and I’d get sad.

I’m sure eventually she gave them away or sold them or something, but having one of *Aunt Phyllis’s* dolls was the dream. I do think part of it was so rarely being told no as a kid, but also that taunt of “you can’t touch them or have them or look at them, they’re just THERE.” That was the holy grail of my childhood.

Cut to now, forty years later. I am a grown-ass woman. My Aunt Phyllis is in her eighties and has been having some health issues, so my parents and cousins are helping her move into senior living apartments in town. This means cleaning out her house, which understandably has a mountain of stuff in it. (It’s not on “Hoarders” levels, but it’s cluttered.)

My mom texts me and says, “Your aunt can’t take a lot of this stuff with her when she moves. Is there anything you’d like?” I said there are two things I’d be open to taking - books (another thing my aunt used to collect), and a Cabbage Patch Doll, if she had any of them left.

Last week, my mom goes, “Come up the house, I have something for you.”

AND THERE SHE WAS.

She is out of the box. I’m not putting her back in. She’s been in a closet for *forty years*. I am going to take this doll and love it until it *falls the fuck apart*. I’m going to get it dirty. I’m going to let the dog play with it. I’m going to make up for four decades of this poor thing not having a little girl to love it by being the big girl who loves it.

And I’m changing her name to something awesome. Like Carrie Fucking Fisher.