Dolls and Other Childish Things

My wife got me a cabbage patch doll as a solstice gift this year. I’m 47 years old. I started bawling as soon as I opened the package. This… is a complicated story.

I could summarize the whole story with a short, reductive tl;dr:

my wife got me the cabbage patch doll that I never got to have as a little girl.

But that summary is reductive to the point of inaccuracy. Because I did have a cabbage patch doll when I was a little girl. And also, at least by some folks’ understanding, I was never a little girl. I’m a transgender woman (just in case you somehow got here without already encountering this detail) and I had and still have really supportive parents. But as amazing as my parents were and are, they weren’t my whole childhood. It takes a village to raise a child, after all, and if the village is the super transphobic 80s (and 90s), well… the child gets a huge dose of transphobia. And more than anything else, I think, transphobia complicates things. Like it profoundly complicates this story.

Read more: Dolls and Other Childish Things

So let’s start this story, not at the beginning, but near the end. Because it’s that kind of story.

My Problem with my Wife and Kids’ Piles of Stuff

I’m the mom in the family who cleans the house, and I’m usually quite happy to do it. I find it calming to clean; I think through scenes I’m going to write while I work; and I consider a clean house to be a key foundation of my mental health. While I would not claim for myself the title of “neat freak,” I have always led a pretty tidy life and kept my living spaces neat and generally clean.

In college I could pack my entire life into two cardboard boxes, the kind that printer paper comes in. I was mildly proud of this fact, even though most people thought it was kind of sad.

When I married my amazing wife, I was very aware that our approaches to housekeeping were very different. I like the aforementioned neat and tidy household; she is more of the “the corners of every room are stacked with boxes of unsorted stuff that once got shoved into the box to clear a desktop and the box hasn’t been opened since” school of thought. But she’s also the kind of person that appreciates me helping her tame the mess and get things put away. That was what I could bring to the marriage. So I said “I do” looking forward to a lifetime of cleaning up after my wife.

And then we had kids.

Kids have a lot of stuff. Kids are not great at putting things away. Kids are sentimental and want to keep ahold of things that they don’t even use. Toys they don’t play with. Books they haven’t read in years. Craft supplies they’ll never use. And being the GenX and Millenial parents that we are, we were intent on following our kids’ lead, letting them make decisions about their living spaces, supporting rather than directing, and all that. Which meant that their rooms were constantly dumpster fire messes.

Where before my family was a partnership between one messy person and one neat person, now I, the not-quite-neat-freak was outnumbered by family members whose stuff was always spilling out all over everywhere. And increasingly, it seemed to me, they simply had too much stuff. They never got rid of anything, and no matter how many shelves and drawers and closets we had, they were all constantly filled to bursting.

I tried to model for my kids how they could go through their things and get rid of stuff they didn’t use. Clothes were easy: this doesn’t fit you anymore, give it to a younger kid. Sometimes I could transfer this to toys and books: you don’t play with this, you don’t read this, that kid you gave your clothes to might enjoy this as much as you once did. Nice and responsible and pro-social community-building stuff, right? Invalidated, perhaps, by my cut-throat end goal of get rid of this trash.

Oh, that’s worth noting. For a little while I told my kids that if they didn’t care enough about a toy or book or whatever to take proper care of it, then that toy or book or whatever was trash. The definition of trash, I told them, was a thing that nobody cared enough to take care of. Yeah. Not proud of that one. Before I knew much about how neurodiverse brains work. I swear I’m better now.

Anyway, I was driving myself nuts over this, constantly trying and failing to get my kids (and also, let’s be honest, my wife) to just get rid of stuff, to have less stuff, to reduce their material footprint as much as possible. Someday, I dreamed, they too might fit their whole life into two paper boxes.

And then one day I was in my kid’s room, surveying its usual unholy chaotic travesty, the piles and piles of forgotten books and stray craft supplies and naked dolls. Honestly, I thought, how can they even live like this? Does living in this mess not give them hives? Then out of nowhere, my brain came up with a thought. It does this, sometimes, when it’s being particularly traitorous and underhanded. In any case, this was the thought:

maybe I don’t understand my family’s desire to keep artifacts from their childhood because I never had any artifacts from my childhood that I wanted to keep.

And the only reason that I didn’t just lie down on the floor then and there was because there wasn’t any space on that floor.

But the thought did knock my legs out from under me, and I staggered my way into my office and sat down and rolled the thought around in my head. Maybe my kids and my wife wanted to keep mementos of their life because, well, they had pretty good lives. Lives they wanted to remember. Maybe those piles of things weren’t so much a bad thing but a record of the good things.

My egg had cracked two years before my traitorous brain served up this little thought, and… yeah, I’d accumulated some things in those two years. But before that? Precious few things. It’s hard to find things that fit into your life in a memorable way when you yourself don’t fit into your life.

So let’s jump backwards, now.

The Cabbage Patch Kid Craze

In 1982, Coleco Industries licensed the rights to artist Xavier Roberts’ Little People line of soft fabric dolls with plastic sculpted heads. Rebranded as Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls were mass-produced and mass-marketed to mind-boggling success. We’re talking $2 billion in sales (yes, billion with a ‘b’) and literal riots when stores didn’t have enough supply to meet demand.

And I, an eight-year-old girl pretending to be a boy, asked my parents for one. For totally legitimate boy reasons.

Now, yes, the Cabbage Patch Kids were marketed to both girls and boys, and the product was such a runaway fad that this worked to some extent. Everybody wanted a cabbage patch doll. I was not the only ostensible boy asking for a Cabbage Patch Kid, which was one of the reasons I felt like I could ask in the first place. I’m pretty sure I even pointed at a television commercial and said, “Look, boys can get them, too.”

Now, we went to a moderately frothing-at-the-mouth evangelical church. It was the 80s; nearly every evangelical church in the United States of America was gleefully forming up ranks for what would soon be called “The Culture War.” I got… a lot of gender programming from church, especially as Doctor James Dobson’s Focus on the Family rose in prominence. Everyone at church seemed focused on making sure I grew up to be a good Christian man, which meant a whole host of things: a provider for my future wife and kids, a spiritual leader in my future household, unambiguously masculine and mildly disdainful of feminine things (so nobody might get confused), a reliable tithe-giver at church, and somehow most importantly, celibate until married. To my little girl brain, my parent’s choice of church seemed like tacit approval of what everyone else at that church said, did, and believed. (I’d learn about congregational politics much later.)

Dolls did not figure into the vision of manhood that our church really wanted to instil in me. But there were commercials that said boys could get these dolls, and at eight, everything on television was true. So. Worth a shot?

Now, with a few decades of hindsight, I can see that my parents were way the hell more open-minded than I thought they were as a kid. My mother especially was a fan of the children’s book William’s Doll, a book in which a little boy asks for a doll which, after some huffing and puffing from his father, his mother provides so that William can learn to be loving and nurturing, preparing him for the day that he becomes a father. So, long story short (too late), they said they’d get me a Cabbage Patch Kid.

And this is where things started going wrong.

First of all, I insisted on finding a boy doll. Remember that disdain for all things feminine I was taught at church (and the playground, and movies, and…)? Yeah. My eight-year-old brain turned that into me having a boy doll being more acceptable than me having a girl doll. I also required a white doll. Yeah, I know. Ick. Thanks to capitalism and structural racism (excuse me, I repeat myself), there were a bunch of brown cabbage patch dolls available, but they would not do. I wanted a doll that looked like me. And somehow they found one: caucasian, with short blonde hair and green eyes.

My pre-transition memory is a swiss-cheesed wasteland of ‘i know i did this but i don’t actually remember doing it.’ But I remember exactly what he looked like in his original packaging. I named him Brian.

The schtick of Cabbage Patch Dolls was that you didn’t buy them, you adopted them. So I could be Brian’s dad, neatly matching the expectations laid down in William’s Doll. But I refused to do that.

For mysterious reasons that I could not articulate, I did not want to be Brian’s dad. This presaged the complicated feelings that I would discover when my wife and I had our first kid. I did not want to be Daddy, I did not want to be Father, I did not want to be Dad. By my thirties I had realized (but would not say aloud) that what I wanted was to be Mommy, Mother, Mom. (Instead I shortly thereafter started identifying as non-binary in the hopes that that would be “enough” and it took me ten years to realize that no it was not. But I digress.)

So instead of becoming Brian’s dad and calling him my adopted son, I became Brian’s “big brother” and he was my “little buddy.” I had already accepted the title of big brother to my younger brother, so that was familiar. It was also… ineffably unsatisfying.

I carried him around with me, dangling by one soft hand, so we could play together. We played lego. We played GIJoe. He just sort of sat there. How, I wondered, was a doll supposed to work? What was the appeal, here? He didn’t sit up very well, and couldn’t pose at all. But sometimes I’d curl up on the couch and read him a story. That felt right. We read a lot of stories.

Here is what I did not do with Brian: I didn’t cradle him. I didn’t hug him. I didn’t change his clothes (“the outfit he came with is good enough”). I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t feed him pretend food. I didn’t kiss his plastic forehead. Because those were girl things that girls did with their girl dolls.

I wanted that doll so so much, but I couldn’t bring myself to play with it like a doll.

Eventually he joined the collection of stuffed animals from my earlier childhood at the foot of my bed.

Almost ten years later, in high school, I insisted on taking Home Economics as an elective course… for mysterious reasons I could not articulate (a theme!). The centrepiece of that class (by my estimation) was carrying around a pretend baby and pretending to care for it. I used Brian, augmented with some weights so he’d be properly heavy enough. This time, I did cradle him, hug him, talk to him, change him, and feed him. I did so ostentatiously, loudly, as a performance. In class. Because by then I’d come to understand that I could do all those things that I wanted to do, as long I made it a joke.

I was so funny.

My Wife’s Solstice Present

For Solstice this year, my wife got me a double-barrelled gift. First, an Our Generation doll, Jenny, whose backstory is that she bakes. She comes with all sorts of accessories: a mixing bowl, a package of flour, a rolling pin, cupcakes, and a cute little chef’s hat. Because I bake, too. So she’s like me. I was very touched by the gift; I’m pretty sure I was already crying as I held the massive pink box she came in. I’d shared the revelation that I’d had in our kid’s room with my wife, said specifically “because I never got to have dolls,” and since she’s a wonderful person, she found me the baker-doll.

But along with Jenny, the package also contained a festive-coloured bag. Something lumpy inside; mostly squishy but one end was hard. The tag read, “It’s Never Too Late.”

Inside was an original Cabbage Patch Doll. Caucasian, green eyes, short blonde hair… and pigtails.

I bawled. I held her against my chest and I cried, hard. I think I scared our kids a little bit. My wife gently prompted me to explain the significance of the gift, of the doll. I tried; I failed. And sorry to only say this now, near the end of the story, but I’m not going to be able to explain the full significance here, either.

I couldn’t put her down. Eventually the kids wandered away to do their own teenager things and my wife settled into one end of the couch to read. I leaned up against her and cuddled my doll. I was there for hours, cradling her, shifting her from one baby-holding position to another. I smelled her hair (it smells like yarn). I kissed her forehead.

I named her Elizabeth. I’ve always loved that name, especially because it has so many variants. I strongly suspect that she’ll end up being called Lizbet for short.

Because here’s the thing: when I hold her and I close my eyes, I’m an eight-year-old girl again. If I think about my parent’s house, I’m there. Eight years old and in a yellow play dress I never got to wear. Cradling Elizabeth. Hugging her. Talking to her. Watching television together. I’m an eight-year-old girl again but this time I got what I needed and I wasn’t too afraid to accept it.

I told my wife, “Holding her feels like healing a wound so old and so deep I forgot it was there.” She said she could tell it was there when I told her about not having dolls from my childhood. (That was also when I described Brian with enough exacting detail that she was able to find such a perfect match.) I cried, on and off, as I felt parts of my heart get stitched together.

Later, my wife said, “If you want to sleep with her, you can do that. She’s soft and cuddly for a reason.” And I thought, psssh, like I’m going to do that. Sleep with a doll? Like a child? What am I going to do, start talking to it, too? But sure enough, when we finally headed upstairs to bed, I still couldn’t put her down. I tucked her into bed alongside me, I curled up around her little fabric body. I whispered, “Good night, Elizabeth.”

I slept so soundly.

The next morning I re-arranged my bedside shelves to make her a little bed there. Which is not to say that I don’t sleep with her any more. It just means she has a place where I feel like she’s comfortable and safe. Somewhere she can be while I take a shower or make (not-pretend) dinner. For Christmas, Santa brought Elizabeth a miniature pack-n-play, which is where she hangs out while I work. When we watch family movies, I bring her along so she can watch, too. She likes it when I share my popcorn.

The voice in the back of my head that says I’m acting weird keeps getting quieter, mostly because I’ve felt the, for lack of a better word, therapeutic value of having a doll when you’re a 47-year-old transfemme who missed out on the experience when she was eight. And seriously, if I didn’t do things that other people might think were weird, I certainly wouldn’t have transitioned. Just holding her is soothing.

Holding her is holding onto a memory of something that never happened but should have.

Holding her is holding my girlhood.

I’m not letting her go.