Mother Love

Divorces can be stressful things, often ending in violence and sadly in some instances the murder of one of the couple (usually the woman) ....

D.I.V.O.R.C.E

But there is even more stress when there are children involved. Who gets the custody, and visiting rights, are often the trigger for even more extreme reactions than rows over maintenance (alimony) money does.

Take Liz Watson, a 44 year old, from Clifton, Virginia, who had been through a complicated marital breakdown, separation and later divorce from her first husband Steve in January 2010. Three years later she eventually made the difficult choice in February 2013, to move herself and her two oldest children from that marriage to elsewhere ... so she moved herself and the two eldest children from Kansas to Virginia (leaving the youngest to live with her husband), to live with her now-husband, Jeff, and their shared 18-month-old daughter.

However the 15, and 13 year old, the two eldest of her children felt uncomfortable with the new living arrangement (as well as missing friends etc), and wanted to go back to Kansas to live with their father and sibling in the old family home. So she made the tough decision to allow them to move back to their father's house in Kansas, in June 2016.

'Making the decision for Dylan and Asher to live with their father was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. It was like giving my children up for adoption'.

Ms Watson said that she then felt a sense of loss that she had never experienced before, and began to feel anxious about how much of her first children's lives, that she would miss out on. 'Every day it feels like death. Every day, I think about the moments that I've missed. It haunts me. It keeps me up late at night with panic attacks sometimes'.

So she has spent thousands of dollars on lifelike, 'human' dolls, to help her deal with the loss, and has been a self-proclaimed 'reborn baby doll' mother since 2016, after discovering the hobby on-line.

Reborn Baby Dolls - Handmade From Silicone

In December 2016, just five months after her children moved back in with her ex-husband, she bought her first ever 'reborn baby' doll, and she is now the 'proud mother' to nine of the reborn baby dolls (age range between newborn to 12 months old), who all have their own names. She has dedicated an entire room in her house to creating a functioning nursery for her reborn dolls which includes a crib, a wardrobe, a changing table, and shelving to store diaper's, baby toiletries and accessories.

This is not a cheap preoccupation, as the average reborn doll can range in price from £287 to £1,231 ($350 to $1,500) .... creepy or what? But the story pinged with me because it reminded me of Everard Cunion, who dresses his own shop mannequins as substitute 'girl friends' .... so perhaps its not just nest loss mothers who have this obsession with plastic beings ... I guess some people handle difficult personal situations in different ways..