A divorced mum has chosen to live with a series of lifelike baby dolls after her children left to live with their father following a bitter divorce.
42-year-old Liz Watson is a “reborn” mom from Clifton, Virginia, who found comfort in living with a series of lifelike baby dolls after her kids decided to live with their father rather than her following a bitter divorce in 2010. Though her children lived with her for a while, they eventually chose to move in with their father.
To cope with the ‘loss’, Liz has been growing her baby doll collection and even built a large nursery for the dolls at her home. As the mom insists, she likes living with her dolls because she knows that they will never leave her.
While some people find her coping mechanism weird and most unusual, the 42-year-old says dolls made of silicone and vinyl help her deal with the fact that two of her children from her previous marriage left her to live with their father.
Though the mother is now remarried and shares an 18-month-old baby daughter with her new husband, Jeff, she still keeps and cares for her baby dolls as if they were her real babies.
“Every day it feels like death. Every day, I think about the moments that I’ve missed. It haunts me,” Liz expressed as she recalled the time her two children left to live with their father.
“It keeps me up late at night with panic attacks sometimes. The dolls really give me comfort because I connect them with the feelings I had of being a mother to my two older children when they were young.
“I know these dolls won’t grow up, they won’t get taken from me, a divorce will not affect my ability to care for them. I know they will never leave me.
“You always hear people talk about how time flies by so quickly and it isn’t until you’ve watched your kids grow up in the blink of an eye, that you realize how true this actually is.”
As the mother went on to admit, she sometimes also takes her baby dolls out in public even though her own family and friends think they are “creepy.”
“Most of my close friends and family know about my collection of reborn babies. Most of them think that it is a strange hobby and some even find them creepy,” she added.
“However, everyone that spends a good amount of time with me can clearly see how happy they make me and they have accepted that they are a part of my life.”
Though not everyone agrees with her unusual hobby, the 42-year-old’s new husband has come to accept the mom’s ever-growing baby doll collection.
“Initially the realism of these dolls induced an amount of stress on my husband. They somehow released the same stress he felt with the pressure to protect and provide for our own ‘living’ children,” Liz says.
“He supports me in the hobby the best that he can. He has allowed me to convert one of the rooms in our house to a nursery for my reborns and he doesn’t complain much when I continually add dolls to my collection.”
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