It's a Doll, Don't You Know? Why Reborns Work For Me.

Sitting here tonight, with the curly blonde head of my constant companion, my 32 inch reborn toddler doll, nestled into my shoulder, it occurs to me that I'm incredibly lucky in many ways, luckier than some people I've heard about or know. I have a husband who is completely supportive of my hobby, I have wonderful and understanding friends, I have a wider circle of friends, mostly on Facebook, who share my love of these one of a kind, life sized, weighted, baby, toddler and child-sized dolls which are all hand-made works of art. More than that, I've taken my dolls out on numerous occasions and I've never had adverse reactions to them, and I know for a fact there are people who have been stopped in the street, been subjected to nasty looks and mean comments. I've put up audio and vidio to audioboom and Youtube and haven't received hateful or mean reactions and I know for a fact that people have closed their accounts on both places because of constant trolling. As I say, I have been incredibly lucky.

And yet this harmless hobby is constantly villified. I choose to talk openly about it on Facebook and Twitter, partly because it's so much a part of my life that if I hide it I'd be locking a big part of me away and that's just too much like hard work, and partly because people fear the unknown, and there's nothing to fear here. There are two results of my talking openly about my reborns. One is that several of my friends now have reborns of their own. The other is that I'm constantly getting enquiries from the press, asking if I'll do interviews. As I found out the hard way, this is a very hot potato which you have to handle with extreme caution.

The bottom line is, the press don't want normal. They want weird, eccentric, something which will sell a story and preferably go viral. A grown woman who plays with dolls is grist to their mill. However good a light you try to put yourself in, you are, if my experience is anything to go by, going to end up looking like an idiot, and where the press leave off the bloggers will take up the slack. In a funny way I'm not sorry I went down the press road, I needed to learn that lesson, but I wouldn't do it twice, that's for sure! It's a catch 22 situation though. As I said, this is a harmless hobby which hurts absolutely no one, yet when it is written about it is constantly slammed to the wall. Most people won't talk openly about it, because they know exactly what will happen if they do. I tread a very delicate path, trying not to cross over the line of no return!

This is turning into a slight ramble as my thoughts lead me down side paths. Let me get back to my main point. Well, why do people have reborns? It must be because they can't have kids, right? Wrong!

People have reborns for lots of reasons. I know people with big families who have reborns because they're beautiful, they put them in display cabinets because they like to look at them. I know people who have them because their kids are all grown and they want that experience of holding and being around a baby again. Yes, there are also those who can't have children, or who are coping with the heartbreak of bereavement of one kind or another. In my case, it was the former. I am unable to have children.

I have, as I say, amazingly supportive friends. And I know there are people who hear me babble about the dolls and some of them say, some of them only think but would like to say, "I don't understand! If it works for you, hey, whatever makes you happy, but it's a doll, a hunk of cloth and plastic, how can that be so fulfilling, for crying out loud, wouldn't a cat, a dog, a bird, an adopted/foster child," (fill in one of the above) "be better?"

I said to a friend on Twitter today, we each have our source of Solace. I have dear friends who adore their dogs and cats. I'm most definitely not an animal person, I don't know why, I just never have been. Please don't get me wrong, I get on with them perfectly well and would never wish them harm, but a constant companion? A go to in time of crisis? No, not for me. And as for adopting or fostering a child, well we won't even go there. Let's just say what Julia Roberts said in the excellent movie "Steel Magnolias". "Mama, No judge is going to give a child to anyone with my medical record." And furthermore, I wouldn't ask any child who's already had trauma in their life to come into this kind of situation, it would be completely unfair.

It doesn't always follow that if someone is unable to have children they find it hard to cope. I've known people who seemed to sail along, go do something else and just get on with it. I didn't. I didn't exactly fall to pieces either, but for a long time everything felt very empty and pointless. The thing I really hated, and this might sound awful to some of you, was that I found it really hard to be around pregnant friends. They were getting to do the things I'd dreamed of doing all my life, and now never would. They got to decorate the nursery and pick out baby clothes, share pictures with their family and friends, all the stuff new parents did. Oh I know, they got the anxiety too and the poopy diapers and the sleepless nights and the colic, but I wanted that too. I really hated myself for the resentment I felt when I should have been happy for them, the constant obsessing about all the things I didn't have instead of being thankful for what I did have. I was angry and bitter and self-absorbed, it was a horrible way to live.

And then, one day in 2005, I was standing in a toy shop in New York City, and I was handed a doll. It wasn't a reborn, but it was a very weighted, lifelike baby doll, forerunner of the reborns that I would come to own. It wasn't like the flimsy toys I'd seen for years, it felt real, heavy and floppy, it's head needed support, its hair was downy soft and fine, its skin like velvet. If I try to describe what happened to me then you'll think I'm exaggerating or going mushy on you, but something happened. Some kind of epiphany. I sort of knew I was at a crossroads. And so it proved. Kathy-Anne came home with me, and my life was never the same again. You can laugh if you want, but I'm speaking the literal truth when I say that some kind of huge, empty place inside me didnt' feel empty anymore.

That was eleven years ago, the journey from there to here has been long and sometimes bumpy, but as I await the arrival of reborn daughter number 7 , I can look back and be glad of those years, the lessons I learnt and of how far I've come. I'm not that bitter person anymore, and if people want to call the alternative weird, or, as I've heard some say, a morbid obsession, well I'm sorry. I can't think of anything less morbid. I smile and laugh and feel full of joy so much of the time.

But, I hear someone wailing, you still haven't told us how it works! You can't tell me that a hunk of cloth, plastic, some paint and glass eyes has done all that for you!

Ah well, you see, it's all in the mind! There are people who have a practical, literal mind, sensible, a spade is a spade at all times. To them, a doll, however beautifully and artisticly made, is only ever going to be a doll. And then there are those of us who can slip a little sideways so that, while keeping the real world completely in focus, we can suspend our disbelief and see things as we'd like them to be, or at least that's how I do it. This means that I can decorate the nursery, pick out the baby clothes, share screeds of pictures of my reborns with my facebook friends who have the same knack as I have, and when my little blonde moppet snuggles into my lap and his cheek nestles against mine, I don't feel artist's vinyl at all. I know he's a doll. But to me he's as precious as if he were real.

It would be such a sad world if we weren't allowed to dream, and an even sadder world if dreams never came true.