Cabbage Patch Adults

by Katie Bruggeman

I grew up as a child of divorce in International Falls, MN, a town of 7,000 on the edge of an icy tundra that borders Canada.  We had a paper factory, eleven bait shops, twenty-five liquor stores, seventeen bars, approximately 300 crystal meth labs, and countless unlicensed day care providers.  One of the only stores that hadn’t mysteriously burned to the ground was Kmart, an oasis of materialism in an otherwise barren wasteland.

When the Cabbage Patch Kid craze hit, I was even more susceptible to advertising than I am now, my marijuana addiction notwithstanding.  I REALLY wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid of my own, but the Kmart sold out of them in like fifteen minutes, and my mom ended up “acquiring” one on the Minneapolis black market.  I didn’t really ask any questions about it. 

I finally received the doll one snowy afternoon while I sat watching television in our duplex.  My mom presented her to me with a twinkle in her eye, and I had never loved that woman more in my five-year-old life.  The Kid’s birth certificate read “Felicity San Demure” or some retarded shit like that, but I renamed her “Debbie Johnson,” after my kindergarten teacher.

At that point I remember thinking, “Wait, can I rename her?  Is that allowed?  Do real kids get renamed when they’re adopted?  Why is there a name tattooed on their asses?  Why do they come with birth certificates, unlike all of my other dolls?  Why does she keep looking at me like that?  Where am I?  What’s going on here?”

Debbie Johnson, like many, many of my other toys, is now probably sitting in a mildewed box in my dad’s basement, abandoned due to the fickle attention span that has also left me barely employable at this stage in my life.  But she, like a human child, had a personality, various outfits, a record of her birth, a legal guardian (that felt the need to write his name on her naughty bits), and various other anthropomorphic characteristics.  She could be sitting in that box, freezing and being gnawed on by boll weevils or mice.  Some would say that she had it easy—she was loved and taken care of for a few years, until I started losing interest and growing pubic hair.  But what becomes of those Kids that go unsold, or worse, left in The Patch for eternity?  What happens to those Kids that fall through the cracks?  Where do dreams go when they die, or dolls that go unsold?

Illustration

Justin Tierney

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