According to company lore, Cabbage Patch Kids are born at Babyland General Hospital, a real place you can visit in the tiny town of Cleveland, Georgia (population 3,500). The building looks more like a plantation house than a maternity ward, overlooking a sprawling 600-acre estate folded among the southernmost stretches of the Appalachian mountains.
My family had spent the weekend in nearby Helen, a Bavarian-themed Alpine village served with a Southern drawl. We had visited the Gourd Place, a museum dedicated to gourd art from all over the world, and generally enjoyed the waterfalls and hiking trails of the surrounding Blue Ridge nature areas. The trip couldn’t end there, though. Because as we drove the region’s twisting two-lane mountain roads, my daughters, five and seven years old respectively, had seen the ancient, weather-worn billboards for Babyland General Hospital featuring storks and Cabbage Patch Kids in faded pastel colors and wanted to see what it was all about.
We were not prepared for what was next.
Cabbage Patch dolls, of course, were one of the first Christmas fad crazes. In 1983, their scarcity inspired brawls in the aisles of Toys “R” Us. Each of the millions of dolls sold that year contained an advertisem*nt for Babyland General Hospital in its packaging, cajoling children to make a pilgrimage to rural northern Georgia to visit the birthplace of their Cabbage Patch child. My wife remembered seeing the ads, along with the unmistakable “vanilla baby powder” smell of the packaging.
At the reception desk, an employee in hospital scrubs asks my family if we would like to purchase a “live birthing experience,” for which we would have the pleasure of paying $120. Your children go to an “adoption office” within the hospital. You sit in front of a desk and request the specifics of the Cabbage Patch Kid’s eye, hair, and skin color, as well as its sex. Then you attend the live birth. This process is literally and (un-?)ironically described in the pamphlets placed in the surrounding north Georgia hotels as Babyland’s “Planned Parenthood” option. We choose to go with the free self-guided tour instead.
The Babyland Hospital birthing ceremony began in the late 1970s as an opportunistic stunt to encourage tourism. The Cabbage Patch company had bought an old clinic in their founder’s hometown as a place to produce their stuffed plush dolls, and came up with the birthing gag as a way to entertain curious guests. They moved to their current setting in 2009.
In the antechamber, we tour a nursery/museum with antiquated versions of Cabbage Patch dolls—some, lying in repose in their cribs, others staring wide-eyed in their floppily-staged poses. My daughters alternate between laughing and cringing with unease. Prints of Andy Warhol paintings featuring Cabbage Patch children adorn the walls. A title card informs visitors that the original paintings are held in the Cabbage Patch company’s private collection without elaborating further.
Along the back wall of the hospital, as in an ancient procession, the ground becomes more sacred. Here resides a faux-earthen mound, several feet high, made of painted plaster with geode caves recessed inside—the stuff of ‘60s-era TV sci-fi or Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Sprinkled around the mound are cabbage leaf sprouts from which protrude Cabbage Patch doll heads. If you pluck a baby from this mound, a cashier will ring it up for a mere $60, roughly double the doll’s retail price. It’s like apple picking, where you pay for the pleasure of harvesting your own pretend child.
“So, it’s basically just a big gift shop?” my older daughter asks.
“Looks like it,” I reply, not understanding what we’re about to witness.
A nurse’s voice comes over the PA system: “Everyone, please come to Mother Cabbage. Mother Cabbage is about to go into labor.” She speaks urgently, like a real nurse, rather than a checkout clerk. A birthing ceremony is about to commence.
Herd-like, a hundred or more visitors—toddlers, children, parents, grandparents, myself and my family—move toward the center of the plaster mound where a large synthetic tree stretches plastic branches toward the ceiling. Its leaves begin to scintillate with little rainbows of light. This is the Magic Crystal Tree that indicates when Mother Cabbage is about to give birth. As with many sacred mysteries, it isn’t entirely clear what constitutes Mother Cabbage — whether it’s the tree, or the mound, or the hole that’s about to birth a doll. The Cabbage Patch children buried neck-deep in this section of the plaster mound are electronic; they twist and swivel their heads in permanent smiles like a scene from Dante’s Animatronic Inferno.
Once children and adults gather like supplicants around the base of Mother Cabbage, an employee ascends the dais above and behind the plaster mound. She wears medical scrubs like the other employees, but hers are white. A flesh-colored microphone is taped to her cheek. She walks with the bearing of one entrusted with sacred rites—the oracle of Delphi cosplaying as a nurse from the 1940s.
The Delphic oracle examines Mother Cabbage, but what she’s examining isn’t visible to the faithful. She pulls out what appears to be a large metal caliper, the kind that was once used for dragging fresh-sawed blocks of ice out of lakes in New England. She measures. “I just want to make sure that Mother Cabbage is fully dilated to 10 cabbage leaves,” she explains. She measures in one direction, adjusts the caliper, and measures the other direction. “She is fully dilated,” she continues. “Mother Cabbage is ready to give birth.”
I glance at my daughters. Their rapt attention is leavened with a pinch of fear. They have never heard of dilation.
The nurse/priestess hangs a bag of blue tinted liquid from a hook above her head. “It’s time to give Mother Cabbage her imagicillin,” she informs us. “It’s made from TLC and will help Mother Cabbage deliver the baby.” Magic words are invoked. Fake injections are given to the plaster mound. The blue liquid drips down a clear plastic tube.
She peers down into the magic cabbage chasm. “I can see the baby,” she says.
The children gasp and cheer.
“The baby has bright blond hair. You know what that means?”
The children do not know what that means.
“It means that our interns remembered to fertilize that part of the garden this morning.”
A pair of fathers chortle at the back of the crowd.
“It’s almost time for the baby to arrive. I need all of you to help Mother Cabbage give birth. Are you ready to help?”
The children agree.
“When I say ‘go,’ I need all of you to yell, ‘PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!’ Ready? Go!”
The assembled mass of children zealously shout “PUSH!” The shouts are scattered and disorganized at first, then find a common rhythm, so that the chant increases in strength, volume, and ferocity. PUSH! PUSH! PUSH! The incantation grows. The faithful pump their toddler fists and sway, pleading with the plush baby to emerge from the dilated tree vagin*, as the Dante robot heads swivel and writhe.
The nurse/priestess signals for quiet. She reaches deep into the chasm and pulls out an entirely unremarkable, blond-haired, Cabbage Patch doll. She snips a pair of scissors to sever the imaginary umbilical cord, forever separating the doll from Mother Cabbage. The nurse makes the doll wave at the crowd. The children squeal with delight. My daughters, trying to process the anticlimax, look at me perplexedly. Was that it? Did we miss something?
The adopted doll is handed to the child whose parents purchased it, and the crowd disperses.
Every Cabbage Patch Kid birthed at Babyland has the name “Xavier Roberts,” the doll’s supposed creator, stamped, NXIVM-style, on the left cheek of its buttocks. Roberts was involved in a lawsuit in 1985 brought by a woman who claimed Roberts stole the idea for soft plush dolls from her after he’d seen her exhibit her own version of the doll at a mountain arts festival. The lawsuit settled out of court.
Whatever the lore, Babyland General Hospital is entirely devoid of irony. They are fully committed to the bit, without a whiff of self-satire. This is an immersive birth experience for a floppy baby doll. Not to say the place is without guile. They are very much committed to pumping money out of visitors. Everything, everywhere is for sale. But unlike Disneyland, where the commercial enterprise is contrived to be a part of a grander experience—a roller coaster, a carnival of fun, so that the faithful might buy their mouse-eared indulgences along with an afternoon of entertainment—Babyland is very much about ceremonializing the purchasing of their product, and little else. There are no rides or games. There are only mountains of toys to buy, and a Mother Cabbage birthing ceremony, which you can either purchase for yourself or watch with envy for someone else.
In our hyper-capitalistic society, revenue can make a compelling case for anything. Nothing is sacred, and equally, nothing is profane.
Human birth, as a subject, is fairly traumatic, in my experience. I remember my wife’s face jaundiced-yellow from loss of blood, the doctor stitching her perineal rupture, asking me if our baby was alright as the ICU nurses pumped meconium out of our daughter’s tiny alien blue mouth. For our younger daughter, a C-section, my wife herself was a burst-open chasm, which I peered toward with fear as I was invited to the other side of the curtain to snip the umbilical cord myself. I remember entrails piled on the operating table next to her, but research tells me this isn’t something they do during a C-section. Perhaps they were blood-soaked towels or something. They are entrails in my memory, however, and always will be. Like some kind of suburban faux war veteran, I find myself shaking my head as this violence is transmogrified into entertainment for children.
My daughters appraised the Babyland birthing ceremony as, “Interesting, but a little weird.” Predictably, they bullied my wife and me into buying a pair of cheap, smaller-sized, plastic-headed Cabbage Patch dolls from the bargain bins near the door in order to properly commemorate the experience.
Their tags read: PRODUCT OF CHINA.
Joshua Rigsbyruns an independent bookstore in LaGrange, Georgia. His writing has been featured on Southern California Public Radio, theLos Angeles Review of Books, andThe Atlantic.
