I was six when Baby Alive was born. I can still sing the commercial jingle:

Baby Alive,

Soft and sweet.

She can drink,

And she can eat.

Although I hated alive babies, I wanted nothing more than a fake alive baby. I begged for weeks, and I usually got what I wanted. Not because I was pampered and adored, but because it was easier than killing me. This according to my mother.

Baby Alive came handcuffed to cardboard, face behind plastic. Blonde (of course), and wearing a pink smock and bib. When you pressed her bottom lip with the spoon, it started the gears in her jaw with a loud "NOM NOM NOM" and a slight click.

My mother read aloud the instructions about how to mix the packets of powdered food with water, and how to follow that with a bottle of water so that my darling Baby Alive would consume and eliminate like a real baby, without the stench. The little packets had pictures of fruit on them – lemon, orange, cherry. I tasted each one as I mixed. Finding the concoctions undesirable, I didn’t mind wasting it by spooning it into the mouth of my plastic offspring.

For about a week, I was a model mother. I carried her with me everywhere, wrapped tightly against a chill. I cooed over every spoonful of glop she swallowed, encouraged every gelatinous urination. Then, suddenly, it was over. She disappointed me in some subtle way, and I dumped her into my closet with the rest of them.

I brought her out occasionally when friends were over, to show off the battery operated mouth. My brother liked to feed her a bottle and then run around using her pee- hole as a squirt gun. I’d run after him screaming for my mother, crazy with concern over my baby. Like I wouldn’t be turning her pee-hole on him as soon as I got her back.

Then my brother got the idea that if she could eat fake food, well, couldn’t she eat real food?

There was always sugar free pudding in the fridge because my grandmother was diabetic. It was made with crushed up saccharin pills and tasted like chocolate flavored death, but obviously Baby Alive wouldn’t care about that.

"This will be cool," my brother said. "It’ll look like she’s peeing and pooping at the same time."

She devoured a huge dish of pudding, and after a bottle full of water, kicked off the glee. It was fun, but believe it or not, eventually you do get tired of watching brown liquid ooze from your doll’s bottom. After a while, we threw her back on the doll pile on our way to some other activity.

Then we went on vacation to New Mexico for a week. By all family accounts, I was a real pain in the ass on that trip, and pretty much every other trip. I believe them because I remember sitting in the back seat with myself, wishing I’d quit whining. At a certain point  even my grandmother stopped defending me. On the other hand, did they really think the promise of being allowed to spend five dollars on crap at the Carlsbad Caverns gift shop was going to keep me happy for twelve hundred miles? And what was supposed to keep me happy on the trip home?

When our Cutlass Supreme rolled into the driveway, twenty-four hundred miles later, it’s safe to say that even the one or two family members who had enjoyed the trip were enjoying themselves no longer. We entered the front door weary and homesick. And immediately staggered back onto the porch.

"What is that smell?" my mother asked, her hand to her mouth to filter the fumes.

"I think maybe the fridge went out,"my dad said.

We checked the fridge, and the chest freezer on the carport, and finding them humming, we followed the smell down the hallway to my room. Where we found a heap of naked dolls covered in fetid brown goo. A modern day reference to frame the image would be "four dolls and a cup."

Although I couldn’t hold her with heaving, I cried loudly and grievously when my parents doubled-bagged my Baby Alive and threw her away.

 To assuage my pain, they bought me a Skipper doll that could ride a bike!

Here is the recipe:

Obtain Baby Alive

Make your favorite packaged pudding mix.

Feed pudding to Baby Alive.

Wait.