My Very Real Reaction to My Fake Baby

I'm a little late in following up to the British documentary to My Fake Baby. You'll have to excuse the tardiness, but there are a few things going on here.

I had a weird reaction to the fake baby documentary. I was completely insulted. I was insulted that they kept calling these women "expectant mothers" and these dolls "babies". Look, it might be overreacting, but I went through 8 months of very real illness - in and out of the hospital, non-stop "morning" sickness, gestational hypertension, and on & on. I went through 20 hours of VERY REAL labor. I slept sitting upright in a chair for the first 3 months of my baby's life so that she could find some comfort and sleep with her acid reflux. I held her little 6-week-old head into a head brace while she screamed at the top of her lungs so that they could do an upper GI scan to see if she had an obstruction and needed surgery. I think I've earned the right to be called "mother". I'm pretty sure these women paying $600 and up for a DOLL haven't.

Anyway...

The lives of these women were so ridiculous that Todd and I kept giving each other the What the... look about every 30 seconds.

Take the grandmother who kept talking about losing her grandson. The natural thought process was that the grandson had died. Sad. Very sad. It also made it a little more plausible that she might want a baby that looked like her grandson (crazy, yes, but also understandable). However, you find out later that her grandson just MOVED and he wasn't DEAD. In fact, she talks to him all the time via web cam. She has one of these "reborn" dolls made to look like him and then she shows the grandson over the web cam and says, "This is my new Eddie" (or whatever the kid's name was). NIIIIICE grandma. REAL NICE. Tell your 4-year-old grandson he's been replaced by a doll that looks like him. That won't cause any confusion/abandonment/love issues later in life AT ALL.

The best one was the woman named Sue. She had many of these reborn dolls that she's spent almost $45,000 on them.

FORTY FIVE THOUSAND.

DOLLARS.

She was getting ready to fly to America to pick up a new one - one that she paid around $2500 for (before designer clothes, accessories, plane tickets, expenses, etc.). She CLAIMS she knows the dolls aren't real and doesn't pretend they are. However, that didn't stop her from going to Harrods Department Store to buy Roberto Cavalli outfits and accessories for the doll.

This one made my head spin.

In case you didn't know, Roberto Cavalli is a very high-end ADULT designer who apparently suckers people rich people into buying super expensive clothes for their kids, too. For example, this Roberto Cavalli baby Tshirt is around $140:

I can't even imagine spending that on my kid, let alone a DOLL. Wait, I don't even spend that on MYSELF anymore, but this woman not only bought Cavalli clothes for this stupid doll, she also bought accessories to match.

Hey, there are starving kids all over, but whatever. Spend a few hundred dollars on designer clothes for a doll if you want. It's all on you to have to answer to later... (I mean, SERIOUSLY, what do people do for a living that they have this amount of disposable income to blow on BS like this?!?).

Digress...

So, this idiot freak woman comes to the U.S. to pick up her doll. When it arrives (all boxed up) to her hotel room, I so wanted it to be a Chucky Doll when she opened the box. It wasn't. It was a creepy reborn doll instead (ALMOST as scary as a Chucky Doll).

The best part? It cuts back to Sue all disappointed and the voiceover says, "After two days of bonding, Sue has found an imperfection" and she REFUSED TO KEEP THE DOLL. Sue relayed, "Look, she's still smiling, even though she's injured."

SHE'S STILL SMILING YOU DUMB*SS BECAUSE SHE'S A DOLL.

A. DOLL.

IN ROBERTO CAVALLI.

Look, I don't want to get all therapist-like on you, but these women are ill. Mentally ill. This goes way, way above and beyond being a collector. There's something else going on here. I would love to stay and dissect it with you, but I hear my REAL LIFE baby in that famous designer named TARGET calling. And she's smiling because SHE ACTUALLY HAS FACIAL MUSCLES and a mom that might be crazy, but not as crazy as these women.

And that makes me smile.

Note: If you want to read a good posting about this craziness, visit http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/01/my_fake_baby