A recent BBC America documentary entitled "My Fake Baby" showed grown women doing more than playing with dolls — they were, well, mothering them. They walked them in strollers; they secured them in car seats; and they even had "birthday" parties for them.

Mind you, these dolls, called "Reborns," are more than a simple piece of plastic: "Their bodies are stuffed and weighted to have the same heft and a similar feel to a live baby." Mohair strands are individually attached to their heads and they can even come with a "heartbeat and a device that makes the chest rise and fall to simulate breathing."

Given the attention to detail, it's not surprising that the dolls are expensive — going for as much as $4,000 on Ebay — and that their owners do not treat them like other collectibles such as "Yes We Can" Commemorative Collector Plates or "Hello Kitty" figurines. And given the particular details being paid attention to, it wasn't all that surprising to comes across quotes like "Reborns ... never grow out of their clothes, never soil them. It's just fabulous. The only difference, of course, is these guys don't move." Or, as another "mommy" put it, it's "just the good part of motherhood."

OK, it was a bit disconcerting. As one blogger, whose nom de plume (clavier?) is "Jenny Jerkface," put it, "This hobby (if by hobby you mean mental disorder) ranks pretty high on the weirdness scale."

Weird? Sure. Mentally disordered? Not really. In some ways, "babies" that don't move embody (so to speak) our ideas about parenthood and every other significant personal attachment, albeit in an extreme way: the value of attachments lie in how they make us feel. That's why we don't feel meaningfully bound to another person unless we first have some emotional connection to that person.

In another yet instance of, as the Spanish say, "Jesuits die in threes," shortly after learning about the "Reborn" dolls, I watched an episode of "House" that made a similar point. In "Big Baby," Lisa Cuddy, Dr. House's nominal boss, was in an emotional tailspin after having adopted a baby (actually, she had become a foster mother who intended to eventually adopt the child). The tailspin wasn't caused by the exhaustion you would expect from juggling being a new mom and the Dean of Medicine of a major teaching hospital. Nor was it hormonal (she hadn't given birth, after all) — it was mythological: The experience didn't conform to her expectations, i.e., she hadn't "connected" with the child, so she was considering "giving her back."

While she decided to keep the child, it was only after the requisite feelings surfaced at a time that no real-world parent would describe as the "good part" of parenthood: when the kid is having a meltdown at precisely the same time your undivided attention is demanded elsewhere.

By "any real-world parent" I mean, of course, me. My friends and co-workers are familiar with the following scenario: They call and soon after I answer the phone, I ask them to hold while I ask (that's one way to put it) my son to lower the volume on whatever he's up to while I try to balance being Dad and making a living. Whatever else is happening at times like these, feeling especially connected to my son isn't one of them.

That's nothing of course. What's "something" are the events of the past few months: When he was younger, we were told that puberty and adolescence would be especially difficult for autistic kids like David and that all we could do was cowboy up and do what was necessary.

Well, as Bruce Willis says in the "Die Hard" movies: "Yippie-ki-yay ..." well, you know. Between tracking down specialists, getting tests done, doctor's appointments and the anxiety over what the future holds for David, his mom and I are exhausted. And, of course, the behaviors that told us that these were the difficult times we had been warned about still persist and, oh, yes, we still have our employers to satisfy.

I'm not complaining. Really. I'm only pointing out that what sustains you during times like these isn't some "connection" or feeling; it isn't even some biological imperative (most males in the Kingdom Animalia have little-to-no parental investment in their offspring and even females will often abandon those young with the worst prospects) — it's a commitment that our culture often confuses with a feeling.

The commitment mistaken for a feeling is, of course, love. Not in the ethereal sense we use the word but the love on display in the third dead Jesuit: The new Chinese film "In Love We Trust." Wang Xiaoshuai's film tells the a divorced couple, Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu, who learn that their 5-year-old daughter, Hehe, suffers from a blood disease that can only be cured by a bone marrow transplant from a suitable donor.

Neither of her parents fit the bill — only a full sibling can save Hehe's life. That's when things get really complicated: Not only are her parents divorced, they have both remarried. And even if their respective spouses accept their having another child to save Hehe's life, this is China, home of the "One-Child" policy. Mei Zhu can only have the sibling Hehe needs if her second husband, Lao Xie, is willing to forgo having one of his own.

Without going into too much detail, Lao Xie shows us why Mei Zhu calls him the "most wonderful man in the world." The "love" being trusted in isn't a feeling. While he clearly adores Hehe, those feelings came after he committed himself to her by marrying her mother. Lao Xie understands and wrestles with the price he is being asked to pay — Mei Zhu even offers him a divorce so he doesn't have to pay the price.

What he does isn't "love" as we usually use the word. That kind of love isn't especially resilient. People being asked to sacrifice a lot less than Lao Xie often walk away. The love worth trusting is a commitment to another person and their good that measures itself by how much it is willing to give up for their sake.

This isn't self-abasement — it's sacrifice as in "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." Even when it expects nothing in return, this kind of love makes us nervous: We don't like to feel obligated to other people. Love as commitment is difficult to reconcile with our ideas of freedom — feelings, which are by definition evanescent, are more compatible with those ideas.

Of course, all of us move, that is, we become real people with real needs and make real demands on others. In other words, we are no longer "fabulous." If all that binds us to each other are our feelings, we are all in danger of being given back like an obstreperous adoptee or disposed of like a "Reborn" on Ebay. Yippie-ki-yay.