Pretend Babies. Bleeeeeech.

Inside the stroller: a "reborn doll," a lifelike doll that costs the "mommy" thousands of dollars and comes with free admission to the psychiatric facility of her choice.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Okay. When I was eight-years-old, my grandmother gave me for Christmas a toddler-sized Madame Alexander ® baby doll,  so life-like, so beautiful, so expensive, so plastic. I was extra careful with her handmade, pastel pink leather shoes and tiny white socks. I even hung up on baby hangers her soft linen, hand-smocked dress, her satin jacket and bonnet; and I only let her sleep in her delicate slip and some preemie Pampers ® my mother bought for me as an indulgence. I eventually lost the socks, wrinkled the clothes and pulled out her real-hair eyelashes because I wanted to see if they’d grow back. Motherfuckers did not. 

But that doll felt just like the real deal, and I learned what it might be like  one day to have an actual two-year-old in my arms. Today she is considered “well loved” if you’re appraising her resell condition. (Which I’m not.) 

The thing is, it’s FINE for a child in single digits to play pretend mommy with a cloth-and-vinyl doppelgänger.  For an adult woman, not so much. If you are over 18 and are still carting around a non-breathing infant, you A.) need to up your meds; B.) need to get laid pretty soon and maybe have a real baby; or  C.) need to contact the authorities and arrange a time to turn yourself in, you fucking, baby-killing freak. 

Even if you’re just a collector and have shelves of cutesy little Marie Osmond  creations, you’re still a nine on the creepy scale. But there are, apparently, companies that sell “reborn dolls,” frighteningly realistically styled dolls that can cost over ten grand. Shit. For that kind of money—maybe less!—you can get a real live baby from a crack whore. And while it is a bitch to wean a baby off drugs, the pay-off is that the kid will grow and eventually be able to go get you another goddamned beer out of the fridge while you watch Jerry Springer and continue to become one with your futon. Sweet!

But back to this new sickness. Women are actually ordering dolls that are made to resemble preemies (complete with intact I.V.’s), or even babies who look like their own children did at birth. Now, that’s just fucking wrong. Didn’t these dumbasses learn anything from Haley Joel Osment in AI: Artificial Intelligence? You can’t fuck around with Mother Nature. It always turns out bad. 

I’m sure that the retar…I mean, the females who buy “reborn babies” are victims of this virtual-oriented world in which we now reside. Kids can shoot to death any perceived enemy on violent video games with the flip of a controller. Or they can “take care” of a virtual pet online, and if they forget to feed it or to visit it ever again, at least they won’t find its mummified remains under the bed. People of all ages can invent whomever they want to be on FaceBook or on sites that let them create an avatar. 

If things keep going like this, we can all become completely anonymous and offer designer versions of ourselves over the great, global wireless network and have no physical contact whatsoever with anyone else real ever again. And we can all buy pretend babies, and have pretend spouses and pretend fabulous sex and pretend friends, and live in pretend mansions and drive pretend BMW’s, and go to our pretend jobs where our pretend bosses give us pretend promotions and pretend two-week vacations to pretend exotic locales until we retire after 30 pretend years and sail away on our pretend yachts into the pretend sunset on a pretend ocean in a pretend world in a pretend universe until we finally meet our pretend maker. 

Does this sound like a sane idea to you?