Not As Advertised

    Growing up in the early aughts, commercials were the primary way of discovering one’s inspiration for their next christmas wishlist. In between Nickelodeon episodes, my childhood self was bombarded with bright clips of other children, playing and laughing with the next new Bionicle or overly complicated Hot Wheels track. Just like Molly Moon, I lived vicariously through those commercials. I thought about how grand life would be if I were to have the things those unnaturally smiling eight year olds had. Though rarely did I ever dwell on their joyous purchases past the commercials end.
    Until I did.
    About a month or so ago, I watched Barbie: Fairytopia and Barbie: Mermaidia with a friend because we are grown-ass adults and that’s what we are allowed to spend our time doing. I can’t remember if I ever saw those movies as a child or if I saw the commercials for the dolls from them so many damn times that I grasped the concepts of the films well enough. Either way, when I saw Barbie as her faery self with her giant pink wings flying through the air in the hands of a child that wasn’t me, I was awed. I was a fantasy fiend. Faeries were one of my favorite beings and it was rare to see a doll with such fantastical features. But that wasn’t all. The girl on the screen expertly folded the wings down and slipped a plastic tube, detailed with the shapes of scales, over the folded wings that stuck out the bottom of it to make a mermaid tail and fin. The NASA level science and godly engineering that allowed a doll to go from a faery to a mermaid in the span of seconds was enchanting! There had been nothing like that before, as far as my seven year old brain knew, and I NEEDED IT. 
The next time that commercial came on, I bolted to find my mother and herd her over to the chunky TV set to show her the witchcraft I had witnessed probably a few hours before. I’m telling you, they played these commercials religiously. She watched as the little girl transformed the doll into a fishlike-goddess and swam by her side in some impeccably fancy ocean that was perfectly clear underwater with no waves messing with the sand and plant life and sullying the photogenic moment below the surface. 
It was the most important aspect about this doll. She was shown going under water. Never had I ever seen such advanced technology in the form of a child’s toy. The majority of my upbringing I was told that I couldn’t submerge my Bratz, Barbies, and Polly Pockets in water for it would get stuck in the hollow part of their head and grow mouldy. I condemned the Polly Pockets to an early grave by having them keep me entertained in the bathtub, they also had the smallest space to let water into their plastic skulls given their tiny forms and it was a gamble I was willing to make. So.. with that in my small child mind, I wondered what sort of Einstein level brain power went into protecting the neck-head of the doll from its future watery demise. Clearly it was a valid inquisition because even my mother, a fully grown human with a big adult mind, was taken aback by how awesome this faery-mermaid-hybrid was.
So she decided to go halfsies. She would pay for half of it with her magical, infinitely funded money card and I would pay for it with my wad of dollar bills that would be the result of my labor around the house. The strength it took for me to sweep the kitchen, clean up my room, use that miniature, battery powered vacuum to suck up the dirt from the carpeted stairs, would all go into the portion I was prepared to sacrifice to claim that doll. Nothing would stop me from going to the store and bringing her back home with me to go on a lifelong journey. The images of me running around the grassy space around our townhouse or splashing around in the creek just down a slight hill from our back porch gave me the sweet distraction I needed to power me through tidying up my own messes. 
When the day came to claim my prize, the world looked sunnier, brighter, cheerier. I strolled through the pristine aisles of Toys R Us until I spotted her. Multitudinous copies of her. Gracing their portion of the shelf even through the plastic film of their boxes. I trembled with anticipation, and also most likely cold because the air conditioning in those places is ridiculous during the summertime. I staked my claim on the doll in front, presumably because I was unable to reach past that due to my hobbit-heighted stature, only temporarily relieving my grasp to allow the cashier to ring my boxed pride through. I handed over my half of the twenty five dollars that this new addition to my life cost and went on my merry way. 
It felt like christmas coming home, as I waltzed through the door. I was about to savagely save my doll from her suffocating coffin with kitchen scissors so that the two of us could frolic in the creek together. The image of that was so clear in my mind. I would take her down to the shores of my creek where honeysuckle bushes grew and let her roam free in the natural world where she belonged. I told my mother as such, practically vibrating with energy, when something on the box caught her eye.
Warning: do not immerse in water.
I had already been severely betrayed by adults and children alike even at the young age I was. But this.. this wasn’t the doings of bad neighbours or friends. This was lies on a national scale! This was manipulation from faceless villains hiding behind the grandeur of joy and wonder. This was Matrix level malarkey shielding the truth behind glorious false images right up until it was too late to go back. I had been hoodwinked, deluded, gypped, bamboozled. So much so that I just had to look into a thesaurus to find the previous words after “hoodwinked” that would accurately describe what I felt over a decade ago because there wasn’t enough in my own arsenal of vocabulary that would suffice. 
I thought embedding deceiving fruit in the stead of chocolate chips to spice up a cookie was malicious but not nearly enough as that moment there, when my mental world that I built for me and this doll, the adventures we would have, the memories I would make, came crashing down. Nay, belay that. Sank, like the doll was unable to do. Sank to the bottom of the sea like the Titanic where they lay in a broken ruin in the depths of my despair.
Though I never returned her to the cold, artificial palace from whence she came, I saw her as a betrayal in the ranks of my toy-hoard. It was like that for many moons, I looked at her with the same sort of distaste that Catelyn Stark had when she looked at her bastard son Jon Snow. It took time to heal, to move forth, to bring this innocent product of materialistic commercialism properly into the plastic family she dwelled beside. She eventually became a mother of two or three Bratz and found her place in the large dollhouse that stood proud in the basement playroom amongst the twenty or so roommates that lived there as well. And so, the story ends happily, just as it began, despite some turbulence in the middle. 
I still have mcfricken trust issues though. Still gullible as hell. But now I’m gullible with questions. Gullible with the fear of being punked. All thanks to the invisible fiends behind the screen of that boulder of a TV laughing maniacally as they blatantly lie to another naive child. 
I grew a little older that day. And wiser. And the story was passed on from my mother in ballet class, year after year, class after class when she warned us of the dangers of false advertising. When you lift your leg, in the balletic way that you do, you don’t go part way and give up, nay, you put that leg up to you head and hold it there so the audience doesn’t feel the same sense of disappointment as I did that tragic day when they think you’ll be more impressive than you are because you tricked them at the beginning. 
Aye, that story has travelled from generation to generation, informing the young, medium, and old, for I refused to stay silent, lest someone else gets swindled because of false truths. And now I tell it to you, dear reader, this cautionary tale that perchance will guide you to guide any offspring you might have that will then guide their own possible offspring to always look at the packaging, read it, understand it, before you take the thing home. Should you fail to heed this advice and pass it onward, mayhaps I’ll see you at my till at some random drug store down the road when you ask to return something you thought was something else. Just make sure you have your receipt.