I wrote this essay for New York Woman more than twenty years ago. Details of the trashy kiddie culture have since changed (this predated video games, interactive dancing robots, and even Barney the purple dinosaur), but as far as I can tell, parenthood still means being dragged through a swampland of garbage.

My time is running out. In six weeks a baby is going to enter my life kicking and screaming, and I just know he'll be dragging Mister Rogers behind him. For months I've felt the first waves of the kiddie culture lapping at my feet like ocean water contaminated by hospital waste. But floating in the kiddie tide are Tropical Barbie; Scare Glow, the Evil Ghost of Skeletor; and Galoob's Hair Flair wigs in Mohawk Purple. I stand in the room that will be my baby's nursery, an island of tastefulness with a clean wood floor, and I try not to kid myself. Soon it will be covered with crap.

I close my eyes. I see Baby Heather by Mattel, a doll available in black or white from the discount catalog for $109.97. Baby Heather has the uncanny ability to pout, cough, sneeze, hiccup and burp. Bodily functions 'R' us! I picture her worn out, dropped perhaps from a third-story window, with grease all over her pink dress and bald spots where the cats have eaten her synthetic hair.

It's mean to pick on Baby Heather when I very well recall my Chatty Cathy doll and all the Barbie garbage that littered my own childhood. But over the years that I've been distracted from the kiddie culture, it has burgeoned. There are combination-diaper-and-toy supermarkets open half the night, with aisles of human-ear models, aisles of Plasticine activity sets, aisles of Real Ghostbusters Gooper Ghost Squishers. Have you ever seen a Super Dough Squeezer? It's a set of monster heads with holes in the eyeballs and ears and cheeks, through which a child can extrude long, oozing strings of dough. Welcome to the world of Mad Scientist Dissect-an-Alien. Its package says, "It's the slimiest puzzle on earth!" and "Yank out alien organs dripping in glowing ALIEN BLOOD!" and "Safety tested." Can you just see the nuclear families clogging the aisles of Child World, reaching for their Mad Scientist Dissect-an-Alien, saying, "Should we splurge on two? It's safety tested!" The parents -- were they once like me?

I remember the parent riots of Christmas 1983, when the demand for Cabbage Patch Kids exceeded the supply. At the time, I thought it was funny. Now I realize that it was my first clue that the relationship between evil commercial villains and impressionable children was brokered by ordinary moms and dads.

The closest I ever got to a Cabbage Patch was last Christmas. I was shopping on Fifth Avenue for my niece and stepped into a place called Babyland. Instantly I regretted my error. A guard at the door laughed. "The only exist is through the store," he said. So I picked my way through the life cycle of a Cabbage Patch creature: the unformed little head blobs under their green cabbage leaves, arranged like vegetables in a grocery; the little Cabbage Patch Preemies, clutching their adoption papers; the gingham-clad Cabbage Patch Babies, with their outstretched arms and bloated pudding faces, each one unique -- as if that mattered! It was a universe that insisted on being swallowed whole. A month later I was pregnant.

I can't wait for the baby himself. The idea of cuddling him makes me dizzy with happiness, and I bet at first he'll be satisfied with that, and with his ducky mobile and the red rattle and the old-fashioned blocks -- satisfied with the simple life. But for how long? Till he's old enough to hear the cry of the Pied Piper on Saturday morning and to lust after G.I. Joe Cobra Mamba Attack Copters and Count Chocula cereal. Till he's old enough to crawl off with his peer group and be consumed by that great ocean of destructible kiddie culture, glowing with alien blood.

I try to forget that I walked out of The Muppet Movie during Kermit's opening song. I understand I will come to love the Muppets, relatively speaking. I'm told I will greet Mr. Rogers as my savior after a long siege of cartoons. In an effort to accustom myself to the inevitable, to get used to the scummy water before it crashes over my head, I've been enduring a new cartoon every weekend. I lie in bed like a beached whale and let the frantic frenzy of garish productions and their commercial tie-ins beat over me-- Hello Kitty's Furry Tail Theater, Smurfs, Gummi Bears, Fraggle Rock, Garbage Pail Kids, My Pet Monster, Foofur, Hugga Bunch, Muppet Babies, Inhumanoids and Mumm-Ra Lives. Last weekend I watched Lady LovelyLocks, a cartoon devoted to hair. The villain is Duchess RavenWaves, who puts snags in LovelyLocks's hair. LovelyLocks fights them off with PixieTails, giggling magic rabbits who live in her hairdo. Ok, that was enough for one week. The next week I watched Alvin and the Chipmunks, an oldie but goodie, updated with cheap rock 'n' roll. I tell you, you haven't lived until you've heard those chirpy little 45-rpm voices singing, with an almost eerie candor, "We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl!" The baby loved it. He was dancing in my womb, wallowing in the happy music of his culture-- and now, I'm afraid, mine.

copyright Marilyn Johnson