You’re Dark Academia, and he’s Danish Pastel, but you’ve foregone the aesthetic genetic testing since you claim you’ll love any baby, so you’re nervous at the 20-week ultrasound. Fetuses suck their thumbs, hiccup, and make fists; your baby’s pose alarms you. “What’s wrong?” you beg the tech, who has steadied the jellied wand and seems to be tearing up.
“Nothing,” he whispers reverentially. “She’s in tree pose.”
You squint at the baby’s bent leg and tiny hands, whose palms do appear to face each other.
“Namaste,” he says, “She’s…perfect.”
She arrives on her due date, emerging from your womb camera-ready. Your husband provides his phone for her first selfie, her lips puckered, head at a flattering tilt. Even without a vernix-correcting filter, her face is baby smooth.
Post-birth, your breasts briefly produce colostrum, as they should. Then you prep a lecture on Lady Macbeth, and I.v.55’s “take my milk for gall” triggers a greenish letdown. You schedule an emergency appointment with a lactation consultant. “Not mastitis,” she says. Diagnosis? “#That(Baby)Girl’sMom,” she writes on your chart, then notes your mammary glands produce spirulina smoothie.
To record these unsettling firsts, you open your daughter’s baby book, which has manifested a dot grid. “For graphing?” you ask, hoping it’s a sign that this child actually takes after you and is bound for academia. Your husband ventures a guess: “Bullet journaling?” You look warily at That (Baby) Girl, who nods and drools in pastel highlighter.
Perhaps every generation wants for the next to do better, but this child quickly evolves so far beyond you that it threatens to put you at odds. She wakes at 5 AM, ready for the early early session of Mommy & Me yoga. As she waits for you, she crawls her crib, whose periphery glows with a purple LED light strip; she uses her bead abacus as a step counter. She has already arranged her toys in rainbow order, even without having watched The Home Edit.
When your daughter finally says, “Ma-ma-ma,” you rejoice, until she continues: “Ma, ma, ma-tcha!”
“She’s too young to pronounce digraphs!” you wail to your husband. Because all you really want–all any of us want–is for That Girl to love us above all else, including green tea powder, isn’t it?
As That (Baby) Girl drinks from her oversized baby bottle, a sippy chug jug, you slice the avocado for her morning toast. She throws her banana, and you feel relief–maybe she’s not as perfect as she looks?–then see the fruit has arced directly into the blender, which still holds the blueberries she jettisoned that way yesterday.
You imagine That (Baby) Girl as a teenager. “Mom, couldn’t you be a little more normcore?” she’ll say. You’ll wrinkle your nose at her signature scent, “Best Life,” which will smell like a Pilates studio with notes of new Prius, and you’ll try to focus on having finally published your research in Shakespeare Quarterly. You’ll ignore the data: that fewer people will read “Lady Macbeth’s Nihilistic Diction” in your entire lifetime than the number of Pin clicks your daughter will receive in just an hour on her Pinterest productivity vision board photo of kiwi, green apples, and celery propped in a canvas sack with the caption, “Make it happen, girl.”
Then you console yourself: It could be worse, right? You tell yourself that old Jewish folktale where the woman feels cramped with her snoring husband and their chicken and the rabbi advises her, repeatedly, to let additional barnyard animals into their home. When the menagerie becomes untenable, he tells her to let all but the original chicken go, and she revels in the comparative calm.
You can play that game. You imagine opening your door to all the additional aesthetics you didn’t have: a horse girl and a VSCO girl, a cottage core kid and a Kawaii kid, a steampunk and a baddie, and maybe even a coastal grandmother. You envision them leaving their hay and scrunchies on the floor, fixating on exposed beams and anime, upcycling pocket watches and ripped jeans and yards of linen and wide-brimmed sun hats, and the potential clutter overwhelms you.
So then you release them–“Out, I say!”–letting one aesthetic after another tumble out that fantasy door until you’re just left with That (Teen) Girl and her affirmations and plant-based supplements, and you think you’re being careful not to let her out, too, but you wait too long and she slips right out, and you feel her loss, what it would be like if she left, and the truth is that sooner or later she will.
One day she’ll leave to be perfect at college. She’ll post a #DormTransformation, a stitched-together social media post where you blink and the room morphs, in just an instant, from a devoid framework, a cracked, serviceable shell of a living space, whose potential you couldn’t see, into a carpeted fairytale of tasseled curtains and textured throw pillows. Just below the hanging ferns, you’ll glimpse the 18-year-old copy of Macbeth that you will have hidden in her spa water storage bin, to be discovered once you’ve headed home and it is too late for her to give it back, inscribed to this girl “of woman born” who will now be a woman herself.
The ultrasound tech was right, and he was wrong. That (Baby) Girl was “perfect,” but in ways you never used to consider. The #DormTransformation will blow your mind because it’s so not you, or maybe because the entire vision is beyond you, beyond the capacity of your Dark Academia mind to have created it, even to have imagined it.
Even though you avoid social media (except for #DystopianBookTok), you know you’ll heart her dorm makeover post so hard. You’ll heart it so hard you’ll accidentally unheart it and have to figure out how to start over, how to heart it once again, just the right amount.
