I'm Strawberry Shortcake

My daughter very much loved her Strawberry Shortcake doll. Rosie's Strawberry Shortcake was a handmade doll with the requisite strawberry sprigged dress with apron, the requisite red-haired pig tails, the requisite strawberry-sprigged puffy bonnet and the requisite embroidered freckles.

A friend of mine spent the whole year making beautifully handmade children's toys and clothing, often imitating the popular commercial toys but rendering them in skilled, homemade craftsmanship. 

I only wanted my little girl to have soft, cuddly dollies. When I saw the soft handmade Strawberry Shortcake at that woman's craft sale, which she held in her garage a couple weekends around Thanksgiving time, in the run up, of course, to Christmas, I snatched it up.

The doll became an instant favorite. Many photographs exist, photos I have long sinced mailed to my daughter, although I don't know if she opens the packages I have sent her, of Rosie with that doll.

One year for Christmas, I made matching strawberry-sprigged flannel nightgowns for both Rosie and Strawberry. I had found a large wooden doll cradle in a garage sale that I spruced up with white pant. Then I made a complete set of bedding for that doll cradle out of the same strawberry-sprigged cotton flannel. Strawberry bedsheets, a strawberry flannel mattres, a strawberry flannel pillow and two strawberry nightgowns.

Rosie loved that Christmas gift. I caught many joyful glimpses of my daughter trying to get into that doll cradle with her favorite dolly. It was a very big doll bed but it was not as long as Rosie was. When she would become aware that I was, adoringly, watching her try to get in the bed, she would become self conscious and run away from the cradle.  I never commented on her attempt to get in that doill bed, not wanting to encourage any sense of embarrassment. Besides, I wished that doll bed had been just a tad bigger; six inches longer and Rosie could have gotten in with Strawberry.

Not long after we separated, Rosie's father gave her a Smurfette doll. It was a pretty good choice. Her father had noted she loved a cartoon-based, handmade Strawberry Shortcake and he had decided, or maybe his sister and mother helped him with his choice, that she might also like Smurfette.

Smurfettes, like all Smurfs, at least in those olden times, were blue. And they originated in cartoons, with merchandised toys to match.

If I had rejected that Smurfette doll, my husband and my daughter would both have interpreted my rejection as me toying with Rosie's love for her dad.  I was actually mildly pleased by his choice, pleased that he had chosen something she would like. I wasn't totally proud that my little toddler watched cartoons enough to covet the accompanying merchandise but, hey, if I could justify a soft, handmade Strawberry Shortcake, Elden could buy her a Smurfette.

It was not the cartoon character doll that bugged me. It was the cheapness and crappiness of the Smurfette. Just now, it occurs to me that maybe he won it for her at a carnival coin toss because the Smurfette he gifted Rosie had the cheap quality of a carnival barker's prizes. It was made of cheap fabric, literally stuffed with actual straw, had a painted face except for the eyes which were two badly sewn on black buttons. No one gives a two year old a doll with sewn on buttons. She could have choked on one!

That straw-stuffed Smurfette's seems began to unravel immediately, with the straw falling out. I actually stooped, a time or two, to sewing up the seams. The doll was never made to be a little girl's favorite but it took over as Rosie's most favorite doll. It got filthy but I could not wash it, not like I could the Strawberry Shortcake. The craftswoman who made the Strawberry Shortcake only made dolls that were machine washable. If I had tried to wash that Smurfette, even just by hand with a washcloth, the doll would have fallen apart.

How Rosie adored that Smurfette. I saw that it represented her father's love, both for her and hers for him. So I kept my cringes to myself and let her take that Smurfette with her everywhere until it, blessedly in my view, fell apart. Maybe, and this may only be retroactive wishful thinking, maybe her father took it out of circulation. I never would have. I wanted to see the end of that cheap doll.

I even suggested to Rosie's father that he ask my dollmaking friend to make a Smurfette for Rosie. The dollmaker very likely would have. She made dolls for a living because she loved the work and she seemed to especially enjoy finding popular characters that were popular with little girls. And why not? Such dolls sold well. Her rebuffed my suggestion, angrily accusing me of hating the doll only becuase he gave it to her. So. Not. True.

Blessedly, and the details have faded from my memory, that Smurfette's roll in our family came to an end.  Strawberry did not remain as one of Rosie's most favored dolls forever but she always held a place of honor amongst Rosie's steadily changing display of her most loved dolls. Strawberry was often given a seat of honor next to Rosie's absolute all time favorite stuffed doll, a machine-washable Gund brand rabbit Rosie named Fluffy.

Fluffy cleaned up pretty well. And Fluffy went off to college with Rosie, worn but still relatively clean because she was made to be washable.  I sometimes wonder if Rosie still has Fluffie. I loved it when she took Fluffie with her everywhere, even off to college and for holidays with my family in Chicago.

I used to refer to Fluffy as my grandbunny.

For many years, Rosie always gave me coupons that I could cash in throughout the year as part of my Chrstimas gifts. A coupon might be for Rosie to do the dinner dishes without complaint, good for one such chore. A coupone might give me the right to ask Rosie not to be her typically morning crabapple to my always morning cheerful self; it used to be such a downer sharing my life with a morning crabapple whilst I was, as a close law school pal labeled me and then many of my law school pals adopted, as Chatty Cathy. Wes, my friend who labeled me Chatty Cathy, would joke in the student lounge as we hung out with lots of other students between classes, saying "I dare you, call her up at 3 a.m. and even if she was sound asleep when the phone rang, she will pick up and start talking, not need a moment to wake up, she'll be her Chatty Cathy self instantly."

The secret to my middle-of-the-night Chatty Cathy persona was unrelated to my chattiness. If my phone rang at 3 or 4 a.m. and the caller identified him or herself as someone I knew, I was instantly present to that person out of care, present because of my tender, loving nature. I always reasonsed, and still do, that if someone calls me in the middle of the night, they must really have needed to talk to someone and it was an honor to be the one they chose.

Once, in 2008, a now former friend called me at 3 a.m. We had talked the evening before, I had said something that triggered some anxiety in him, he was having trouble sleeping and he finally gave into his anxiety attack and just called me. It was the first 3 a.m. call I had had in years, maybe even decades, but, I am proud to report, I reacted like the Chatty Cathy channeler I am. When that person began by apologizing for calling, even before he could tell me why he had called, I said 'I am glad you called. If you were upset and calling me will help you, I am glad you called."  I was proud of my tender, 3 a.m. kindness to someone that, at that time, I barely knew.

Fast forward a year or so. I faced a sleepless, anxious night fretting about the same person. remembering he had called me at 3 a.m., I called him. He did not pick up and he criticized me repeatedly every time we interacted for several weeks, rebuking me for having disrupted his sleep. A couple times, he went so far as to chide me for having disrupted his work the following day because I had disrupted his sleep. Yet when I tried to remind him that he had once called me at 3 a.m. and my assumption that calling him in the middle of the night was acceptable since he had done so to me, he didn't exactly deny he had made that 3 a.m. call. He just ignored what I said and kept on berating me for my call. Ouch. that memory hurts. I am crying right now as I type.

I can take so long to get to the thing I set out to write about. This is about Rosie's Halloween costume at age two as Strawberry Shortcake. She and I had looked at the packaged cheap cartoon character costumes sold at stores like Target. She badly wanted me to buy her the Strawberry shortcake cheap thing. All it was was a cheap-o mask of Srawberry's face, a red dress made out of very cheap fabric that always seemed flammable to me (but it was illegal to sell children's items made of imflammable fabric) and a puffy hat with a strawberry or two printed on it.

Growing up, my mom had made all her kids handmade costumes. Great costumed.  I had been raised to loathe those cheap Target-type costumes that were nothing but a very cheap mask that made it hard for kids to see if they went out trick-or-treating and very very cheap, tacky clothin. In the early eighties, that kind of junk might only have cost five bucks.

Rosie wanted to be Strawberry Shortcake so badly. But by then, I was practicing law and a full time single mom. And I was not feeling crafty or clever.  Or maybe it was laziness. I went so far as to look at pattern books in fabric stores. Sure enough, I could have bought a Strawberry Shortcake pattern and, after spending a whole lot more than the five bucks a junky costume from Target would have cost, plus hours spent sewing, I could have made an authentic Strawberry Shortcake. But my mom's Halloween costume values had become mine.

My whole being balked at making a handmake costume of a cartoon character.

So I came up with what I thought was both a brilliant and very easy costume. This was early to mid-eighties, probably 1984 because this happened in Lawrence and by Halloween 1985 we were living in Minneapolis.

I decided Rosie would be a punk rocker, along the lines of Metallica or some band or another that painted their faces black and white. I painted her face in a swirly divie, white on one side, black on the other, with a white star painted around her eye on the black side and a black crescent moon on her cheek on the white side.

Then I bunch up her hair into a few pony tails, going up the back of her haead and cross the top of her head to her forehead. Then I filled those ponytails with black and white pipe cleaners to give her a thick mohawk, stuffing as many pipe cleaners into her fine-haired ponytails as I could. It worked. It looked like she had a black and white mohawk, kinda popular amongst teenage boys at the time.

I put her in a white men's t-shirt, painted my version of a skull on the t-shirt. I bought a few yards of cheap chain at a hardware store, the old fashioned real hardware store where they had endless rolls of chains in all sizes, sold by the foot or the yard. I draped a few 'necklaces' of those chains on her, made a belt out of a chain. Put on black tights under the adult male t-shirt that came down past her knees.

And everyone got what she was supposed to be instantly:  she was a punk rocker. It was a truly great costume. And by my personal standards, it was exceptionally great because it was both clever and had been very easy to pull off.

It was such an awesome custome that I took her to the Halloween party at the Lawrence children's museum. That party had costume awards, broken down for age groups. Rosie not only won her age group but she won the grand prie for best children's costume at the party. this drew lots of happy attention to Rosie. Almost every adult at the party would come up to her and say "HOney you look so cute, who are you supposed to be?"

And she answered, every single time, in her chipmunk squeaky voice, "I am Strawberry Shortcake." She totally believed she was Strawberry Shortcake. I had not lied to her. I had said things like "Strawberry would be great but the costume from Target is cheap. I can make you a much better costume. You can be a punk rocker. How about that?"  She happily agreed to my proposal but she had not fully understood what I had promised. She had no idea what a punk rocker was and she knew, passionately, how much she wanted to be Strawberry Shortcake.

It felt like a win win to me. she got a lot of happy, positive attention. She loved winning a prize. She loved being told she looked adorable. And when she chirped "I am Strawberry Shortcake" to all the adults who complimented her, no one suggested to her that she wasn't Strawberry Shortcake.

Truth be told, I had a blast. Every time she chirped "I am Strawberry Shortcake" while looking like an awesome, miniature punk rocker, I almost split into star dust with my own joy. I was proud of me, proud of my clever costume, proud of my child's happiness.  I was so happy. And so was she.

After the party, which did not run late. After all, toddlers attended, I felt like the evening was too young to end her reign as Strawberry Shortcake. So, even though we had eaten dinner before the party, I stopped somewhere on the way home to get ice cream sundaes, to prolong her moment in the spotlight. Quite a lot of people in the restaurant came up to her and said she looked great and asked "Who are you supposed to be" and every single time, she said "I"m Strawberry Shortcake". Everyone laughed. Everyone was happy to see that miniature punk rocker believing she was Strawberry Shortcake. No one but me understood the situation, not really, but a small child's joy is infectious. Everyone understands that.

Man, that was a great Halloween, even better than the time I dressed her up as Carmen Miranda.But that's another story.

I wonder if Rosie remembers taht she once was Strawberry Shortcake at age two. Sort of.