Cute, But They Can't Love You Back?

Ahhh. The days of youth. They bring back so many fun memories. Today I thought about the babydolls that I played with as a little girl. I had a few of them and even watched stories about them on TV. They were all cute. The interesting thing about dolls is that even though you love them, they can't love you back. You can give them baths, feed them, and tuck them in at night, but they'll never love you back the way you love them. Here are some descriptions of my favorite dolls.

First memorable doll - Baby Alive. It was so funny to see her mouth move like a fish as she imitated eating. I fed her the 'baby food' and wrapped her in the plastic/tissue 'diapers' that came with her instructions. (I couldn't read at the time). As time went on, I started to treat her poorly. Instead of feeding her the baby food, I started shoving crayons in her mouth to see if she would eat them. I wasn't trying to be mean; I wanted to see if she could eat something other than 'baby food'. The red crayon got pretty far, but after a while I stopped. Her mouth didn't do the fish move properly, and I ran out of diapers.

My next doll was Tina/Sam/Priscilla aka TSP. Now the reason for her many names is that each day, I would forget it. I don't know why I couldn't remember her name from day to day. I remembered family members' names, but couldn't remember that doll's name to save my life. So each day, it was something different. Now the thing with TSP was she got treated a little worse than Baby Alive. (Again, it wasn't intentional). Baby Alive was hard plastic, but TSP was all cloth except for her plastic head and hands. This cloth makeup cost her my love. One time, I attached a rope to TSP, tied her to a tree branch, and tried to sit/swing on her. One of her arms came off, and I didn't want to play with her anymore until it was sewn back on. Everyone was too busy to do that, so she was left with one arm and no one to play with.

Another doll was the one we girls played with at daycare. We were so young - probably no more than 5 or 6 years old. This doll didn't even have a name and was all hard plastic. Now this doll was our 'baby'. There were about 4 or 5 of us sharing this 'baby'. One of us, let's say, Judy, would put the doll head-first underneath her shirt, so that the doll's head was near Judy's neck. Then Judy would lay on a table and wiggle around making these painful, moaning sounds as we stood around her in a circle. After a few minutes, she would grab the doll's leg, pull it out from underneath her shirt, and give it a name. The 'baby' was always a girl, and we always delivered our own baby, feet first. I think one time a boy was standing by - was he our doctor? - grrr!!! One of the daycare workers saw us do this, and she didn't like it. She took the doll away and told us that we couldn't do that anymore. We really didn't know why. We were just pretending. Who knew that babies came from somewhere else other than your shirt? Self-delivered? Feet first?

Now my last memorable doll was on TV. She was Talking Tina on an episode of the Twilight Zone. The episode involved a mother, father (Telly Savalas - Kojak if you're old enough to remember the 'Who loves you baby' line), and the mother's daughter. Talking Tina was the daughter's doll. Telly Savalas was mean to the daughter, and he wanted her to get rid of the doll. When no one was around, the doll would threaten Telly. She told him how he'd better be nice or she was going to kill him. As the episode went on, the doll made more threats, so Telly tried to kill her. He put her head in a vice and turned, tried to set her on fire (Talking Tina blew the flame out even though her mouth couldn't move), and threw her out with the trash. She never died or always returned. In the end, she did kill him. Telly tripped over her in the dark and fell down the stairs to his death. Tsk, tsk...

So again, dolls can't love you back. Though I didn't always treat my dolls well, I did love them. To some extent, I loved human dolls who couldn't return love, either. Have you?