In the heat of midsummer, while I was at the beach, a woman with a private Instagram account sent me a DM that made my brow furrow as deep as a slot machine.
She accused me of treating my newborn baby like an accessory—a satin clutch at dinner. Admittedly, in the picture the woman was referencing, the baby and I both looked fantastic, her pink-ginger complexion giving Ariel next to me, her Jamaican crab. With my boxers and the baby’s nappy, we looked like a Calvin Klein ad, if they made clothes for infants or cast slightly underweight, considerably under-slept dads-of-one. I just replied “Good one” to the woman and blocked her because I can be petty like that.
I’d love to say that I swiftly moved on, but obviously it played on my mind…hence this retelling. As a parent, showing your baby’s face online is a whole thing.
On Subway Takes last weekend, former Grub Street editor Sierra Tishgart bemoaned the “visually heinous” crime of using emojis over kids’ faces on Instagram, the general consensus being that you are either private (WhatsApp-ing your baby to your mates) or public, the baby’s face front and center. There’s something in the hyper-alertness to “pedophiles that might follow me” that makes the in-between attempts at masking a child’s identity seem more creepy than just not posting at all.
I don’t know how pertinent it is to talk about my baby’s face, the one I keep photographing and posting with abandon. Some—most!—babies come out of the womb looking like ET, a mess of fragile joints and sinewy limbs, their heads a ball in a sock. But my girl arrived perfectly al dente, all chubby cheeks and cupid lips, her nose pointing ever so lightly north. She is what my grandmother would call “bonny,” if my grandmother weren’t dead. I talk to people about how she’s like a personal HBO, gripping programming made especially for me. She is bewitching, she is lucent; naturally, I’m taking a fuck-ton of pics. (And, to be clear, I would love her if she was a Monet too.)
As a new parent, you feel compelled not only to say how lovely it is—and it is—but to show off the loveliness, too; to parade the sprog through the (digital) streets as townspeople gather for a rare glimpse of perfection. Life pivots to you and the baby. I do miss the days when I could have a gummy multivitamin and two negronis for lunch, but the need to be on call, present and lucid, isn’t the punishment I forecasted. My entire life is this new person, and, like most of us, I am used to sharing great swathes of my life online.
