Admit it, you’ve all seen one: An ugly baby. You didn’t want to say it out loud to anyone, maybe you didn’t even want to even think it in the first place, but you did. This poor innocent little thing, thought of as ugly, oh how cruel. It’s not even the babies fault. It may have been stuck in a narrow passage for a bit too long on the way out, was blessed with a few too many ugly genes, or simply has parents that aren’t too crash hot to begin with.
Apparently it’s common for people to think this, as we learned in our pregnancy encyclopedia and in pregnancy class that it is quite normal even for parents themselves to be ‘disappointed’ with the end result, and we were ensured that we would still love it regardless.
Whenever I saw an ugly baby I always thought to myself; how would I feel if that was my child? Can a parent really be proud of and love something that looks like that!?
I kept pondering over the questions, because for some reason, I was fully expecting our baby to come out ugly, and of the worst category at that. I don’t know why, it’s not that I hold myself or Vivian in such low regard when it comes to looks. I was fully prepared to be handed this little naked, slimy, wrinkly, screeching bundle resembling a gremlin, and would have to summon up all my strength to try and not shriek in pure terror.
But no, when I first saw Anna there was none of that. Looking past the slime and goo, she looked normal. Cute even! Ok, she had a giant ungainly red cone on her head, but if you looked at a certain angle you wouldn’t really see it. I never did take a photo of it either, let’s just forget it was ever there. At the end of that long first day, Viv and I looked at each other and said: She’s so cute!!
Still, in the back of my head I thought; ‘It’s my mind playing tricks on me. It’s nature’s way to make sure you look after this child, no matter what other people might think when they look at her.
But we didn’t seem to be the only ones to think that she was cute. Every midwife, nurse, doctor, cleaner and catering person that saw our baby, couldn’t help but utter something with the word ‘cute’ in it once they saw Anna. I was a bit suspicious at first, suspecting they must say that to every parent about every baby, because there’s no easier way to score points with a proud parent. But they all seemed very genuine. Having dealt with thousands of babies day in day out, this particular one, ours, still stood out as cuter than the rest of them. I was convinced, it’s not my mind playing tricks on me.
That was until Alex came to visit us at home when Anna was about 5 days old. As she walked in, some woman came in behind her, and both sat down on the couch. Somehow we were never introduced to her. For all we know she was some random stranger Alex picked up from the street, but then she started mixing in on conversations about caring for babies, so she probably wasn’t. Perhaps a midwife in training, or Alex’s supervisor, it’ll forever remain a mystery.
Anyway, I went to get Anna from the bedroom, and as I held her in my arms and took one step out of the bedroom, the mystery woman blurted ‘oh she’s cute’ in a deeply uninspired but trying to sound excited tone. From where she was sitting she couldn’t actually have seen Anna at all!
My world came crashing down… it’s all an elaborate hoax after all. And it’s happened again since! A shop attendant looking at our approaching pram was midway through saying something with ‘cute’ in it when she realized all that was actually in the pram was a colorful nappy bag.
Now all I have left to do is think of a way to break the news to Anna, that she wasn’t cute as a baby after all.
