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.
Of course, I worry, with all the sharing, that I’m putting the baby onto something of a lookist path. Nobody batted an eyelid when I started posting pictures of my cat. But that anonymous woman got me thinking about my compulsion to share. Am I guilty of continuing the general narcissism of our age into the next generation? Should I be showing the murkier side of parenthood? The diaper rash; the five hours in the ER when she daredevil-ed herself off a table (she is fine)? Is my baby more or less likely to be a nuclear physicist if I show y’all her features? Can she be an astronaut if she’s not incognito? Will she be prime minister if we disregard her appearance in pursuit of a well-rounded personality?
She’s a bit of a miracle child, the genetic roulette landing on a super relaxed tot, with a takes-it-in-her-stride nature that is something I’m keen to nurture. She sleeps through the night, which is unheard of at four months. She rarely cries for more than six minutes. Are these the qualities I should be showcasing?
Posting the baby online doesn’t feel so much like a lifestyle flex, an achievement brag, as a continuation of a conversation I’ve been having with my followers since they followed me. They’ve seen my years bored in an office job; the years I sat writing my books alone in Berlin, picking at my face and overthinking; they’ve seen the epoch when I felt like an interloper in more rarefied circles. As a working-class kid, I was desperate for a certain level of materialism, one that meant new school shoes didn’t have to wait until payday and that saw a bedframe underneath my mattress. But for the past six or seven years, my only aspiration has been to have a baby.
Now that the baby is here, I want to bask in her arrival (and continued presence). I’ve never been someone who wanted simply to show off a pretty life; to plonk boastful gains on a grid and sit back while you covet. As a novice in the publishing industry, I was reared on editorial storytelling, of contextualizing what we were putting out, of understanding the power of a personal lens in the public sphere. I’m not above visual consideration, but above all my posts are an extension of my personality, my particular POV, a feeling that the world (and now my kid) is absurd and entertaining and hilarious.
When I look at my baby, I don’t see the expense of her surrogacy finally paying off. When I look at my baby, I don’t see the chance to flex the lifestyle of gay fatherhood. When I look at my baby, I don’t see an opportunity. When I look at my baby, I don’t see content.
There’s something to be said about exhibiting the life of a Black, gay man who’s unapologetically flourishing; believe it or not, there are still a lot of people who don’t actually want Black and gay people thriving. I flip this coin every day: Am I a show-off or am I a representation of what marginalized identities can achieve? I don’t have an answer, maybe I never will, but in the meantime, look at my beautiful girl!