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She has your creases and my folds!

And she doesn't even cry!

I regularly get e-mail announcement from friends who are welcoming a baby in their life. It is to be expected – after all, I am in the *ahem* second half of my thirties and most of my friends are now mothers and, in some cases, expecting a second child.

So when I received an e-mail today which read « Baby Emily has arrived », I thought that it was coming from another happy couple. Boy, did I freak out when I saw that picture of Emily! Everybody knows that a human being is not at his/her most attractive stage when he/she is only a few days old. So why on earth would anybody actually want a doll that looks like a boxer who just came out of the ring and pay 150$ US for it? It is truly creepy, especially when you read on and find this information about the doll:

Handcrafted in Ashton-Drake’s RealTouch� vinyl skin with lifelike creases and folds – the FIRST « So True Real » doll from Ashton-Drake.

Hand-applied hair and eyelashes and carefully designed finger and toenails for incredible realism.

Hospital bracelets are personalized with the doll’s name.

Each comes with six FREE « birth announcements » and a Certificate of Authenticity.

At least the Cabbage Patch Kids didn’t look real! Can you imagine a childless couple buying this doll and sending birth announcements to their friends and family? The thought of this freaks me out. Is it because I’m not a mother? Who knows, but it just seems odd.

I bet you I could walk around town with this doll in a pram and people would say she looks like me. If you say « Actually, she does! », I’ll kill ya.

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Maturity : the ever-elusive goal

Many of our arguments had this quality of unfairness, in the sense that they were excuses for expressing feelings that did not belong to the present moment or indeed to either of us. I might get furious with Chloe not for the surface reason that she was emptying the dishwasher very noisily when I was trying to watch the news, but because I was feeling anxious and guilty about not answering a difficult business call earlier in the day. Chloe might in turn have been deliberately making lots of noise in an effort to symbolize an anger she had not communicated to me that morning.

We could perhaps define maturity – that ever-elusive goal – as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.

From Essays in Love, a novel by Alain de Botton.