Every baby is beautiful, cute, and coochy-coo adorable, right? Well, yes, of course. Everybody knows that. But is every little bundle of joy necessarily a contender for the title of World’s Most Beautiful Baby? Maybe it’s time we faced the honest truth…that every baby, even the not-so-beautiful ones, is beautiful in its own unique and special way.
Nobody likes ugly babies, but we are not supposed to admit this. In fact, we are supposed to pretend that there is no such thing as an ugly baby. Parents, high on Oxytocin, post pictures of their week old offspring.
Stop.
Please!
Newborns generally look like internal organs, mostly because that’s technically what they were not so long ago. As you happily scroll through your Facebook timeline, you are confronted by an image of a bruised, wrinkly, lung. It is dressed in a onesie, so you conclude that it must be a baby. You press “Like”.
If you are practiced or related to it you keep your shuddering under control long enough to comment: “Aaah man, he’s so beautiful. I could just eat him with a spoon!” Then mommy replies; “Thank you, it’s a girl”, because you know, it’s impossible to determine gender if you cannot identify the species.
The culture for many Black South Africans dictates that one should not expose a baby to people outside of the immediate family before it is three months old. I suspect that it may be, in part, to save the poor public from being subjected to a baby before the cute kicks in. Many people are flouting this cultural practice. I say bring back the embargo. Alas, some babies still don’t look good post embargo.
The reason ugly babies are unnerving is because it goes against nature. Cuteness is the infant mammal’s primary survival mechanism. Since they cannot fend for themselves, babies rely on their cuteness to evoke nurturing and protective instincts out of older, more capable mammals in their environment. Even baby hyenas are cute.
A bunch of us went to go see a colleague’s baby. She’d given birth a week after her sister. Her sister had a really cute baby. My colleague’s, on the other hand, not so much.
We were there for about an hour, and within 10 minutes of our arrival all four of us had unconsciously gravitated towards the cute baby. The cute is what causes you to fuss over a baby. No cute, no fuss. I guess this is why nature concocts a hormonal cocktail to ensure that parents always see their babies as good-looking.
This is also why it always comes as a shock, to discover that one’s children do not appear attractive to others. You don’t want to be the inglorious bastard, who inadvertently burst the parents’ bubble that their lovelet is not nearly as rewarding to look at as their hormones have led them to believe. So I am going to share my 2-step process to surviving an encounter with an ugly baby like a boss.
Step 1: Always refer to the baby as “she”. If it is a girl, you are good. If it is a boy, you will be corrected but no one will be offended. They’ll just assume that he is so pretty he looks like a girl.
Step 2: When confronted with an ugly baby, simply exclaim “What a baby!” It’s not a lie. It is open to interpretation. The parents will interpret it positively, thanks to the Oxytocin. Everybody wins.
You can thank me later.
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