Baby doll

The biggest doll I had was my baby doll. I don’t know how old I was when I got her because I don’t remember ever not having her. She was the size of a real baby. She wore real baby clothes that I wore when I was a baby. Her bed was the real bassinet that I lay in when I was a baby. She sat in the rocking chair that was my rocking chair when I was little. She was the most real doll I had.

She had curly hair and blue eyes, with long eye lashes, and she opened her eyes when she sat up and closed them when she lay down. Her mouth was open just enough that I could see that she had tiny white teeth. She said “Mama” when you laid her down and picked her up again. Her arms and legs were soft vinyl but her body was stuffed so that she was just right to hug.

I talked to her a lot and she looked at me with her bright eyes and seemed to understand everything I said. Maybe she really could understand. I wasn’t sure.

Once when I was about nine I had some money and I wanted to buy a doll from an advertisement. I’m not sure where I saw the ad. It might have been in McCall's magazine or maybe in the Saturday Evening Post. I remember how exciting it was to order something through the mail with my own money.

After the order was mailed, I sat my baby doll up on my bed and arranged all my other dolls and stuffed animals around. I stood in the middle of them and announced that a new doll would be coming to join our family. She would be a very large doll, I explained, taller than any of them. She would be so big that she might be as tall as I was! I would be able to dance with her like the dancing dolls that girls put on their toes.
I reassured them that I would still like all of them, and especially my baby doll, because I thought she would be jealous when I got a doll bigger than her.

It took a long time to get the mail-order doll. I was very impatient. Weeks later a box finally arrived addressed to me. It wasn’t a very big box. I opened it up to find a smallish doll. Was this the doll I ordered? Really? She looked so big in the ad. And it said “6 inches”. Wasn’t that pretty big?

You can tell that I had not learned much about measurement.

I was not only disappointed; I was ashamed to even show this little doll to my other dolls. I knew they would remember how I’d bragged about getting a big doll. As you can guess, my baby doll did not have any reason to be jealous of the new doll!

My baby doll was still my biggest doll, and the most real of all my dolls.