Only ten more day till our five-year-old granddaughter’s birthday, and I’ve got to come up with a better gift than the in-laws’. This one’s a cutie, but aren’t they all when they’re little and they belong to you?

My husband and I had two blond cherubic girls with spun-glass curls and the blared aqua eyes of their father; they are 36 and 38 years old now with four daughters between them. Our son, two years younger, had a full head of red ringlets, not the common orangy color of most red heads. His hair was more brick with veins of gold, and women of a certain age would push their shopping carts all the way across the grocery store just for a feel, as if to touch those magic coins of curls their own grown children might be restored to them as babies.

Well, ladies, I’ve got a no-hassle cure for that peculiar kind of longing.

I just saw an ad in a magazine stating that for the mere price of new refrigerator you can send in a picture of your child and have a life-size doll made in his or her own image. Just think about it: your children grow up and, in the process, give you a whole bunch of joy and pain, but the dolls stay the same—sweet, cuddly, silent and all yours.

Hey, you could place these dolls in the middle of your children’s deserted beds or on a shelf in their rooms and have them as babies for the rest of your life. Or you could set up your children’s old cribs and put the dolls in there and cover them with those crocheted blankets of pink or blue before gender-ID became a condemnation of your inability to accept change. You could rock your children instead of knitting in your old age, take them with you to the nursing home when you go if you want to. You could take your children shopping with you and not even strap them into those tortuous time-out car seats, not have them overturning your shopping cart and screaming bloody-murder, bringing everybody, including the security guards, to see what you have done to them this time.

No doctor visits, no late-night feedings, no messy diapers or tearful first days of school; no PTA meetings, no fear of gangs and drugs. No criticism of you when they get to be teenagers, and no saving for college tuition. You would know where your kids are at night, not have to stay up till their 12 o’clock curfew and check their breath for alcohol, pretending to kiss them good night. And when they turn twenty-one, you wouldn’t have to knock yourself out with that Valium you’ve been hoarding in dread of those twenty-one shots gulped down between midnight and one AM.

They wouldn’t come home from college on holidays with a live-in boyfriend/girlfriend and expect you to act as if it were perfectly natural—So, you were a girl when you left for college and now you’re a boy. Cool! No bruise-blue tattoos on the ankle, which you know darn well would have required cosmetic surgery had they cropped up on their own; no rings through the nose like bulls wear to make them more docile. Hmm. Your children wouldn’t treat you as if you had developed sudden Alzhiemers after they married, and they wouldn’t care if you dressed and twinkled like Dolly Pardon at Christmastime. Everybody’s favorite media escort, Esther Levine, in Atlanta, told me when my son was getting married to smile and wear beige if I wanted to get along with my daughter-in-law.

So, what I’m thinking this morning is about getting one of those dolls for our granddaughter’s birthday, made in her own image, just as she was made in the image of her mother, our oldest child. I’ll be tempted to keep the doll of course.

Yes. If you had such a doll you could curse all you please in traffic, speeding in a panic because you have just slammed the car door on big sister’s finger. You wouldn’t have to worry if by accident you had placed the baby carrier on the roof of your car and driven off, forgetting that poor little trussed up infant overhead about to be blown into oblivion while everybody honks their horns for you to pull over. “Pull over, lady.”

As the saying goes, don’t ask me how I know.