It begins with a run on sentence and then I break it down.

It occurred to me this morning to wonder if my consuming attention to a stray cat who came to play in our yard and beg for milk and food one day when I was 5, and my insistence that the cabbage patch doll I received when I was 8 was a "real baby," was in part fueled by the death of my baby sister when I was three years old.  

"It's NOT a doll!  It's a real baby!"

Maybe all girls who grew up in the '80's were like this.  

     The cat came to live with us after a week of begging at our door, and me doing the inside begging work on it's behalf.  The problem with the cat was that it lived a year before getting himself killed, and we had to bury him in the back yard.  I wrote an epitaph and posted a tombstone.  On the night he died, I remember I removed myself and my broken heart from the table to weep my grief in my bedroom.  The other family members were already talking about maybe getting a dog.  I felt betrayed by their lack of keeping this moment for our shared memories and grief. Grief over the cat who had lived among us for a year, who I had loved and cradled as a baby.  But they were not the ones to have hurried home from Kindergarten each day, in hopes that this stray collarless cat who had wandered to our porch and had been fed, (milk, tuna fish) would be there waiting for me.  I would scoop him up into my arms.   I was the one who's heart instantly bled for this cat, knowing that we needed each other, and yet it was my oldest brother who was given the privilege of naming the cat.  My brother, who thought "Jenny" was a good name for a cat.  I think it was the name of a girl he liked at school.  (Jenny's were everywhere in the '80's.) And then when we learned the cat was actually a boy, my brother and my Dad decided to name him Jake, because we had recently watched a Disney movie about a cat who could talk, and that cat's name was "Jake."  I was a cat mother who had not been bestowed the blessing of naming my own child.  In my love of said child, I quickly got over this slight.

     And then the Cabbage Patch Kid(s) happened, which was probably the most important invention of all time.  These dolls were not all the same, they had different hair color, eye color, dimples, or not, freckles, or not, boys, or girls, with pacifiers or without, and they had individual birth certificates with individual names.  As the adoptive parent, you could choose to officially have the name changed, if you sent the form in with your autograph.  And some of the given names were quite strange.  But that was the nature of the Cabbage Patch.  You never knew what you might get.  Or I should say "Who."  The other reason these "kids" were so popular is that they were hard to acquire.  Your parents had to stand in line outside of the warehouse and catch them as they were thrown off of the delivery truck.  They never made it to the store shelves.  And I, like all of my peers, wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid So. Very. Much.  And so I would pray that when I got home from school that day, there would be my very own Cabbage Patch Kid waiting for me at home.  Never happened.  Then Christmas time, circa 1984.  Let's just start out by saying it was good, so good, to be an 8 year old girl at Christmas time in 1984.  If you weren't in to the Cabbage Patch, there were also Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, herself the Elf, and My Little Pony.  The 8 year old girl had much to be thankful for circa 1984, circa God Bless the USA.  

     That Christmas, I honed my Christmas Present gift spy detective skills by offering to water the Christmas tree often.  This was before the fake tree revolution, when you had to water the tree by hand.  So I would take my time and think NO ONE COULD EVER TELL that I was actually looking for any new presents under the tree which had my name on them.  I was looking for a VERY specifically shaped box.  It was not there.  But there was one box in exactly the same shape as a Rainbow Brite box, so I was convinced I was getting Rainbow Brite.  Commence the mental self talk of trying to not be disappointed, and be able to receive my Rainbow Brite with a grateful, non comparing heart.  

     On Christmas Eve, my cousin casually told me "You're getting a Cabbage Patch kid for Christmas."  It didn't matter that she wasn't supposed to be telling this to me because I didn't believe her. She said "I'm not lying, you really are getting one."  This cousin was 6 years older than me, already a teenager, and she had a cabbage patch kid already; in fact, I believe she had boy twin cabbage patch kids.  But to her, it was more of a novelty item than the cry of her heart to adopt her own child, to have and to hold from this day forward and always care for with the utmost of concern and attention to details.  

  Christmas morning.  Opening presents.  We always took turns opening one present at a time.  It prolonged the suspense and made us actually see what each person had received.  When it was my turn, I was handed the Rainbow Brite box.  I was at peace with this moment, having had weeks to sort out my feelings on the matter in the privacy of my own heart.  So I opened the box.  It was not a Rainbow Brite box after all, but the box the cabbage patch kid comes in before it gets placed in the fancy store box.  I was shocked.  Happy shock like a sugar coma invasion on my nervous system.  Now we girls circa 1984, we were just like real grown up pregnant ladies who have their pre conceived notions of what their upcoming baby will look like.  "I want a red haired blue eyed girl with a pacifier."  this was what my friend Debbie had wished for; this is what her father had happened to catch off of a delivery truck outside of Toys R Us at 6am one morning.  But also, just like real grown up mothers, whatever my ideals for the perfect child were were thrown out of consciousness the moment I actually laid eyes on my actual child.  She was a girl, with brown braids, tan skin, and brown eyes.  She was perfect.  I would not wish to change a thing about her, because she was mine.  Her given name was Darlene Ernesta, and I did not feel right changing her birth name.  Even though people would say that a name like "Ernesta" was "weird."

  Never mind that talk, Darlene, you pay them no mind.  For I, too have an usual middle name, so really, like mother, like daughter.   

     Maybe I was unique in my attachment and attention to what was, in all crassness, a plastic item.  Maybe my yearning and ease at which I drew cats and Cabbage Patch kids alike into my ever mothering arms was because of the staggering loss I could not even then fully comprehend when my baby sister had died, leavening me with a huge gape ripped out of my heart before I had ever left the age of three. 

 Or 

   Maybe all the other 8 year old girls growing up in the '80's were just like this,  too.   Just trying to sort out the various babies and cats and children in our hearts.  Just trying to mother our lost babies.  Even the ones of which we were not yet aware.