Midge Hadley, the Pregnant Barbie

I wonder what roles I would have felt obligated to fill as an adult if Midge, the pregnant Barbie, were instead an astronaut, a divorcée, a bad friend.

Midge Hadley is a perfect pregnant woman. Her body does not change, other than when it grows the large belly it looks like she was born to carry. Her arms stay thin, hair shiny and red, skin chiseled and tense—like it’s cut from a mold.

I inspect my nine-year-old tummy poking out of a tankini in my best friend Maddy’s bedroom mirror and ask her if I look pregnant. Her room is hot, so we’ve been lying on the carpet after a swim to let ourselves dry out of the red Pennsylvania sun and our mothers’ watchful eyes. Maddy’s box of Barbies peeks out from under the bed.

She joins me at the mirror and we bloat our little-girl bellies, pale as milk, and stare.

“When my mom had my brother she almost died,” I say as we pull the Barbie box into the center of the room.

“But Nikki just pops out of Midge,” Maddy says.

It’s 2003 and Maddy and I both have Midge Hadley Barbie dolls, the 2002 models with magnetic pregnant bellies. We snap and unsnap Midge’s belly and let Nikki, a newborn the size of a thimble, tumble out. We could pop Nikki into our mouths if we wanted to. Maddy won’t allow it. We make Midge give birth every time we play, but it doesn’t hurt.

We don’t rename any of our Barbies—especially Midge, because this isn’t a make-believe game. When Alexa from the cul-de-sac tries to play, we wince at how she grabs our Barbies. She doesn’t care that there are no pillows on the bed yet; no apples in the fridge from my Hi Ho! Cherry-O board game; that Grandma Hadley’s hair is a rat’s nest. For me and Maddy, playing doesn’t start for hours. We are styling, arranging, curating. We are playing out dreams of motherhood and womanhood, dreams that, as an adult, I will laugh at myself for having, then feel guilty for letting go of. Between the two of us, we have more than thirty dolls. Thirty roles to play, and yet Midge is the favorite.

Mattel originally created Midge Hadley in 1963 to placate parents who thought Barbie was a sex symbol. Barbie could never be pregnant; it would ruin her figure. So they created Midge, a girl next door with red hair and freckles. Midge has a full, round face, like the round faces Maddy and I try to make slim with bronzer in middle school. She is less intimidating: not as sexual as Barbie, but cut from the same mold (so they could share clothes). In 2002, Midge was rebranded as pregnant and part of “Happy Family,” a line that includes Alan Sherwood, her husband; their three children; Midge’s parents; an unnamed dog; and a Black Midge with her own family, who never get names.

At the same time, Britney Spears, crop tops, Myspace, and America’s Next Top Model are in vogue. Shows like Sex and the City, Friends, and Will & Grace are, perhaps for the first time, allowing women to voice their sexualities and independent desires in the mainstream during the brief period between when they are daughters and wives. When they are more Barbies than they are Midges.

Some parents think Midge is too young to have children. Mothers are worried Mattel is glamorizing teen pregnancy. An article published in 2002 says Happy Family was pulled from Walmart shelves in December of the same year because the company was getting too many complaints that Midge was “sending the wrong message.” The first pregnant Midges aren’t sold with Alans included, and some Midges are apparently made without wedding rings. Later, Walmart will only stock Midge Hadley Sherwoods with her daughter already born, without a pregnant belly. A cutout of Alan looms behind her in the box, smiling and waving.

Maddy is better at playing Midge than me. She knows how to nestle baby Nikki in Midge’s arms, close to her breast. She loves brushing her long red hair, over and over, ripping through the plasticky snarls with satisfying crunches. She is good at making Midge’s children happy. I’m not sure how to play this game, how to play a motherhood that it seems like she and Midge somehow already know. I sing songs to my Midge’s kids that my grandmother sang to me and hope they fall asleep. It only feels natural.

I don’t yet wonder why this pregnant woman is who I want to be and why this is the role I feel most destined to fill. I don’t yet cringe at all of the playtimes we spent as girls just waiting to be women, and then wives, and then mothers.

I don’t yet wonder why this pregnant woman is who I want to be and why this is the role I feel most destined to fill.

Midge Hadley has a husband, and his name is Alan Sherwood. His wiry brown hair gets messed up if he’s been in the Barbie box too long. My Midge does not have an Alan, but Maddy’s does, so we let the Midges go to the spa in Barbie’s convertible, tired from being perpetually pregnant. Alan, who is a male model and wears blue flip flops, has to babysit. He nervously waves goodbye to the Midges. He’s not alone with the kids much.

While they’re gone, the kids rebel. They tie Alan up in one of Barbie’s dresses and stuff him under my bed. When the Midges get home, they just laugh. They untie Alan, who is nice to them and not mad. Each of the kids kisses the Midges on the cheek, and then they all go to bed. Motherhood is easy in the Dream House.

That year I also learn about periods and sex from the American Girl Doll picture book Maddy’s mother gives her. My mother laughs at the drawings and yelps at the graphic pictures of vaginas. When I ask her about tampons, she makes a puckered-up face and says that tampons scare her. The way she describes them makes me feel like plastic—like plastic going into plastic. I agree that I prefer pads, though I won’t get my period for another seven years. I am used to this sanitizing of female bodies, of plastic cracking, bending, masking what’s inside. I’ve been playing at it for years with every magnetic snap of Midge’s belly. I make a sacred pact with myself to write off tampons for good. When the time comes, I can’t insert one without panicking, so I make Nikki T. do it, and she puts one in my ass instead. I still can’t use them.

It’s 2022 and I’m an adult and I call Maddy to ask her about Midge. She’s living back at home in Pennsylvania to save money to buy a condo, and though we’ve lived apart for more than a decade, I yearn for her parents’ sectional sofa and waffles heated up in the microwave with maple syrup. I can’t find Midge anywhere for sale, I tell her. I only find vintage—not pregnant—Midges, who wear high-waisted bikinis and fifties’ bobs.

I tell Maddy about all of the research I’ve done. I tell her how Midge was created, discontinued, rebranded. She’s been California Dream Midge, Hawaii Midge, Wedding Day Midge. She never got articulated legs like the rest of the Barbies. Barbie Happy Family Pregnant Midge & Baby sells for $315 on Amazon. But not ours, not our old Midges, who we took into the pool and the tub and the backyard dirt and down the shore that one summer. Not our Midges, who are still in boxes under beds. Not our Midges, who we’ve caught up to in age now. I practiced being like Midge for years, even after all of the other girls replaced their Barbies and Skippers with makeup and push-up bras. I’m not practicing anymore. I’m still just like Midge—full face, freckles scattered across my nose—except now I cringe when I think about having a pregnant belly, a little Nikki inside. I don’t have to, I assure myself out loud to Maddy on the phone. I cancel the Midge I ordered on Amazon before my credit card can be charged.

It’s 2006, and we’ve mostly stopped playing with Barbies. We’re handing in signed permission slips in Mr. Scranton’s sex ed class so we can watch the birth video. I’m shaking all over because my mother told me it would be scary, but Maddy is laughing with Dan F. about something I’m not listening to. A couple of girls leave the room before the video starts because they’re too squeamish. Maddy rolls her eyes.

“They need to see this,” she says. I nod seriously but sit on my hands and chew on the collar of my T-shirt.

My mother’s sister is pregnant with her fifth child at the time, who I will be a godmother to. All natural births, my aunt always says proudly. Although I spent my childhood with Midge, I still can’t quite picture what that means. When she tells me she’s pregnant, I immediately yelp “Why?” in my grandmother’s kitchen.

Though I already know what sex is, when my mother signed the video permission slip, I hoped she would say something to prepare me or offer some wisdom. But I never receive a sex talk, which as a twelve-year-old I’m grateful for. When Maddy’s mother gives her one, she only offers one piece of advice, which Maddy and I repeat to each other and marvel over: Just make sure you come too. I will repeat this to myself in a college dorm room when I’m trying to have sex, years later. Trying to feel less like plastic.

In sex ed, Mr. Scranton starts the video, and I don’t watch much, especially when the woman starts screaming. I catch a glimpse of the baby crowning, its emerging head violent and urgent, and I shiver.

Maddy and I, adults now, wonder on the phone why they don’t make pregnant Midge anymore. Maybe being pregnant isn’t as cool as it once was.

“Was being pregnant ever cool?” I ask her. I’m looking at my stomach again in the bathroom mirror, telling myself I could get pregnant if I wanted to. Three years ago, I got off birth control because it was making me depressed, so I could do it, in a literal sense. My research on Midge is making me want to, but looking at myself in the mirror, I remember that I’m not a doll, and this is real. I ask Maddy what it says about us that pregnant toys were our favorite, and she laughs.

“I’ve always wanted to be pregnant,” she says, and I can’t remember a time when I’ve ever wanted it, apart from when I was playing Midge. I wonder what roles I would have felt obligated to fill as an adult if Midge were an astronaut, a divorcée, a bad friend. When did the games of my girlhood stop being role-play for my future?

When did the games of my girlhood stop being role-play for my future?

Maddy is in the attic of her parent’s house when we’re on the phone, so she digs out the Barbie box. Everything is where we left it. Her Midge wears a shiny silver band on her left hand, and she sends me a picture. I realize fully, suddenly, perhaps for the first time, that I’m married too.

I google Midge Hadley and end up watching Barbie’s “Life in the Dreamhouse” web show from 2013 late at night while my husband is asleep next to me. Midge shows up in Malibu animated in black and white as Barbie’s best friend from back home in Wisconsin, where things are “behind the times.” The show suddenly has a laugh track.

“I have the grooviest of news,” she says to Barbie. “I’m moving to Malibu!”

In reply, Barbie’s little sister Skipper says, “You look like a movie on that channel nobody ever watches.” Cue laugh track. Skipper is wearing a pink-and-purple skater jacket. She’s always been the cool one.

I laugh out loud at a compilation video called “Life in the Dreamhouse-Best of Midge.”

In one clip, Barbie offers Midge a sandwich: “I’ve got a PB and J on whole wheat!” She is wearing a hot-pink swimsuit, ready to surf.

“Whole wheat?” Midge snorts, lounging under a large umbrella and a wide-brimmed straw hat, skin translucent in the sun. “You know I don’t eat spicy food!”

On the show, they don’t mention Alan or Midge’s children, and I fall down an internet hole trying to figure out what happened to them. Everything Barbie Wiki says they broke up and Alan is now caring for the children alone. I study the Midge in the videos. Her voice is singsongy, and she looks younger than me now. She never mentions the magnetic belly.

I send Maddy the link. They make Midge look stupid, we text. She’s nothing like our Midge. We understand her. We exchange defensive messages about how beautiful she is, how different we were from all the other girls. We knew more Midges than Barbies. We weren’t organizing fashion shows or learning to surf; we knew nothing about that. We sang like our grandmothers did to get our Midges’ kids to sleep, and we played games in the Dream House like our mothers did with us at home.