Tim meets me at Rotherham Central train station. It's a bright, crisp day, and he's dressed in a green padded jacket and a long knitted scarf that’s unspooled from his neck and trails close to the ground. Cradled in his right arm is Joshua, who is about five months old. His eyes are closed, and there’s a sleepy smile on his cherubic face. 

 

Tim has cerebral palsy (CP) and uses an electric wheelchair whenever he leaves home. He doesn’t live far away, so it’s a short journey from the station. A woman with a pram passes by and does a double-take. At a pelican crossing, as we wait for the lights to change, a woman catches sight of Joshua. “That’s a nice baby,” she says, and asks Tim what his name is.

"Oh, what a lovely name!” 

"He's not a real baby," he says, smiling down at the doll. 

"I know," the woman replies. The walking man turns green. She says her goodbyes and we set off.

 

When we get to his bungalow, his fob doesn’t work for his power-assisted front door. He wears his keys on a lanyard, and he fumbles with the button on the fob. “It’s supposed to open,” he tells me. The door doesn’t budge. Thankfully, there’s a key. I lift the lanyard from his neck and unlock the door, wondering briefly what would have happened if nobody was with him.

 

Inside, it’s dark because all the curtains and blinds are drawn. Tim finds it difficult to pull them, so he usually leaves them closed for privacy. His home is specially adapted for his needs, and light switches are accessible from kneeling height. He cannot walk, so when he’s not using his wheelchair, he crawls on all fours or shuffles on his knees to get around his home. He takes his coat off, and I see he’s wearing a blue shirt that reads “Proud to Be a Reborn Daddy.” 

 

There are dolls everywhere: in cabinets, perched on his kitchen table, sitting on the sofa, jumbled in his room. They’re dressed in knitted cardigans, fleece trousers, patterned babygrows, just like real babies. His cat Sooty, snoozes on a warm Skybox by his computer in the living room. Tim says it’s better to sit in the kitchen as there’s more space. He offers me a cup of coffee: water in a kettle, instant coffee in mugs, a splash of milk. We both take it with two sugars. I’m suddenly aware that small everyday actions — like opening the fridge, holding a spoon — are things I take for granted, and for Tim, take a bit longer to do.  Sooty emerges from next door and jumps on to the kitchen table, before promptly falling asleep. 

 

I first came across Tim, who is 42, last year after reading an article about him. He’d been subjected to online abuse because he’s a reborn doll collector. “Rotherham man’s heartfelt plea after bullies brand him 'pervert' for baby doll collection.” “It’s hate. It’s bullying,” he tells me about the comments he gets — often on Facebook. “At the end of the day, bullying is wrong and needs to be addressed.” 

 

A reborn doll is a hyper-realistic baby doll, often made and painted by hand, and the artists who make them are known as reborners. The dolls are collected and treated as works of art. “I’m not one of those [collectors] who go crazy crazy,” he says — some reborns can sell anywhere from £500 to £2,000. 

 

It’s a niche and often misunderstood subculture: collectors — who mostly tend to be women — face stigma, as people look down on the hobby, and ridicule the idea of adults “playing with dolls”. Others find reborn dolls, and their lifelike features, creepy. Some of the comments Tim received called him a “pervert” and made allusions to Jimmy Savile. More comments below the article expressed similar sentiments. “This clown wants locking up, looks like a danger to society,” one read. 

 

In many instances, reborns help people cope with fertility issues or the loss of a child, and are sometimes used as part of therapeutic treatments for Alzheimer and dementia patients. I remembered reading a moving piece about an American woman called Vivia, who had an intellectual disability. In 2018, a writer followed her “parenting” journey. Vivia wanted to be a mother — as a compromise, she bought a reborn doll online.

 

As she held the tiny body to her chest for the first time, Vivia felt a rush of maternal love. [...] Like many new parents, Vivia spent her first days with her baby in a cozy haze of infatuation. Each parenting task—diaper changes, feeding—contained a new thrill.

 

For Tim, his reborn dolls offer him a sense of fatherhood, something he’s always wanted to experience, but because of his CP has been unable to. I gently ask him to clarify. Did he not meet a partner? Does he have fertility issues? CP affects a person's coordination and motor skills, and he worries about his ability to parent. “I think my spasms would get in the way,” he explains. He has friends who have had children, and has held babies before, which he describes as a “fabulous feeling.”

 

In the UK, it’s estimated that 1 in 400 children are born with Cerebral palsy, and it’s a lifelong condition. It’s usually caused by an injury to the brain before, during or after birth but sometimes there’s no apparent cause. A Sheffield-based charity called Paces helps adults and children with CP.  “Some people can have it severe, mild,” he says. “For me, it’s physical.” He cannot hold a coffee mug, and uses a straw to drink. Swallowing food can be difficult. He also has a speech impediment, which means he speaks slowly and some words are hard to make out. (For example, I initially mistake his mum’s name Janet for ‘Jenny’).

 

Tim started collecting his reborns five years ago, and has around 70. He enjoys dressing them, and finding new outfits. He shows me how unfastening babygrow buttons and putting the clothes on is physical therapy for his hands, which get painful. Over time, his joints will deteriorate and become more painful.  Holding his reborns soothes his anxiety and helps with his depression. Some dolls are weighted to be the same as a real baby. 

 

I ask about his childhood.“A lot of it…I can’t remember,” he says. “Selective memory — I faded out the hardest bits of my life.” He was born in Whiston, and has lived in Rotherham all his life. He’s always been paternal, and he remembers that his affinity for dolls started when he was a young boy — he preferred playing mummy and daddy, while other boys his age liked to play rough and tumble games: cops and robbers, toy guns. 

 

His parents were Janet and Derek, and his mum cared for him full-time. He was often off school ill. He remembers being constantly bullied until he was about 14. Once a teacher called him spastic after he accidentally knocked something off a desk. The term referred to people with CP, but its meaning is now derogatory. He told his mum, who lodged a complaint. “If you got on her wrong side, you’d know about it,” he says. The teacher never admitted to the comment.

 

While Janet “had a heart of gold”, she put a stop to the dolls. At some point, she left Derek and met Tim’s stepfather. After she died in 1997 aged 52, his stepfather started physically abusing him. He’s been living independently since he was 18. He has carers and a personal assistant who comes and helps him with his finances. 

 

“It took me four years to pick up the confidence to take a reborn out with me to Rotherham,” he says. Online encounters often question his motives for having the dolls. One woman asked: “Do you use them as a sex toy?” Later, over Messenger for some follow-up questions, I later ask Tim if he thinks people react negatively to his reborns because of his CP, or because he’s a man and — the bit that follows is clumsily worded — “society still finds that idea of men who are paternal unusual.” 

 

“Because I’m male,” he types back. “But why unusual? I mean there are loads of real dads.” I clarify what I meant — in terms of boys and dolls, and the seeming gulf between perceptions of what boys should do and the expectation of good fathers in adulthood. “Yeah,” he writes. “But I class action men as dolls.” 

 

People’s discomfort around Tim and his reborn dolls, and his experiences in childhood speaks a lot about gender stereotypes. “There’s nothing wrong with boys playing with dolls,” he says, and lists the reasons why it should be encouraged: it teaches them valuable lessons about care and prepares them for parenthood. And granted, an adult man with a doll collection is a step away from what might be considered “the norm,” but seeing his interactions with his reborns made me think about disability and parenthood.  His reborns are a compromise, an expression of his paternal wish. But like other reborn collectors, he knows that his dolls will never replace children, but in the absence of them, fill a space and offer comfort.

 

Before I leave, he shows me some of the reborns in his collection: there’s Alma, who has fuzzy hair, Patience, who has beautiful eyes and a sweet face — she’s wearing a soft hat, and is modelled off a baby with Downs Syndrome. There’s also Aiden, nicknamed ‘Chunky Monkey’ who weighs 7lbs — he’s heavy and Tim can’t hold him easily. But among his reborn doll collection are three special ones, called Janet, Derek, and Timothy. “I’ve got my mum, I’ve got my dad,” he says. “A little family.”