Rock-a-bye reborn baby

Last week, my sister Trish (along with my sister Kathleen, and excellent source of the weird and the creepy) sent me a link to an article on something called "reborn babies."

Apparently, there've been a couple of incidents in which folks have smashed the windows of cars (including a new Hummer) to "save" the lives of suffocating babies, only to find out that what's there is just a "reborn baby", the weird and creepy name for what might otherwise be called a life-like doll. (The article doesn't say whether the babies were in car seats - which would have been plenty odd - or just lying there on the seat like the inanimate object they are.)

I had never heard of reborn babies, but I'm certainly not surprised, given the "lifelike pet" business.

Reborn babies - which typically cost well over $1K - are reconfigured, expensive baby dolls that are repainted, weighted, and otherwise duded up so that they look and feel like the real thing.

I went to the site of Kay Dunne, a Canadian woman who makes these dolls, and many of her dolls could pass for the real thing.

This is Dunne's logo, and, while I couldn't find anything that said whether this little one is real or fake, it sure looks like a real baby to me. (Don't you want to just do raspberries on its belly and Kootchy-Koo?)

Dunne and the others who create these dolls are obviously skilled at their craft, which is quite laborious, and includes opening up the nostrils of standard dolls and painted the insides so they look real; multiple coats of paint to emulate a baby's mottled skin tones; are weighted to achieve real baby heft; and have many other little touches. Some of the reborns "have heartbeats" and "breathe." Some have umbilical cord remnants attached. (Do they dry up and fall off after a couple of days?) Dunne makes both special order, bespoke dolls, and dolls that she puts up for adoption.

Most of those who buy the reborns are collectors, but some are grieving parents who've lost a baby.

Even though I have no children, it's absolutely impossible for me to imagine a worse grief than losing a child. It is completely unfathomable - the mere thought of it (especially when it's connected to a child I know and love) is intensely painful.

And, having grown up in a home that was haunted by the death (the result of an avoidable accident in childbirth) of my sister Margaret, my parents' first child, I know that this is not something that parents easily "get over."  My mother went to her grave grieving for little Margaret Mary, 55 years after her death.

My mother lost her baby in the days when not much attention was paid to things like grieving a baby's loss. Therapy was, more or less, get back up on the bicycle. Eleven months after Margaret's death, my sister Kathleen was born. (They were the only set of "Irish twins" - babies born less than a year apart - in our family.)

So if parents want to have a lifelike doll around, far be it from me to question this (other than to wonder whether, psychologically, it's advisable).

And maybe it helps the senile. In one article I read on reborns, use of these dolls for Alzheimer's patients and the elderly was discussed. A doctor quoted in that article, however, said that the dolls don't have to be all that realistic for patients to find comfort in them. He buys his off-the-shelf at Toys 'R Us.

Some of those acquiring reborns are not trying to deal with the loss of a child. Some just out and out miss their children's (or grandchildren's) infancy, and want to hang on.

Hey, most people who spend any time with infants miss it when those days are gone. Forget the foul diapers, midnight howling that can't be rock-a-byed away, projectile vomit, and spit up. You absolutely miss the talcummed, milky sweetness; the feeling of holding that living, breathing "hot pack" against your chest while it's sleeping; nuzzling those silky little heads; and, oh, that baby-soft baby skin. Sigh.

But it does seem kind of creepy and a tad unhinged about trying to replicate this with a doll, rather than figure out how to find real live babies - living dolls -in your own life, or in your community, that could use an occasional snuggle. (Of course, with the real thing, you also chance the diapers, spit up, shrieking....)

Ah, well, to each her own.

I just wished they called them something other than "reborn babies" - that term's just to unsettling for me.