Pretty Baby

I was destined to get mogged by my daughter.

May 10, 2026

Happy Mother’s Day! I wrote this months ago and never shared it, but figured it fits for the holiday. I can’t believe I had my baby just last year and will have another in four months. AHHHH. Anyway, a new journal for paid subscribers will arrive within the next couple days, so be on the lookout for that! Hope everyone has a beautiful Sunday.

The most beautiful girl in the room is zero years old. She wraps her arms around my neck and I feel the brittle ecstasy of having nabbed someone way out of my league. Feel like everyone’s staring at us, wondering what a girl like her’s doing with a girl like me.

It began in utero. As my daughter’s ultrasounds started looking more human, my friends said stuff like, “Her profile is TEA!” I shrugged them off. All ultrasounds look the same, I assumed, and there’s no way these swirls of amniotic fluid and half-formed appendages are any indication of how your child will actually look. Right? RIGHT???

Aesthetics consume too much of my life as it is. Pregnancy felt like a necessary break. I could cut myself some slack, and avoid speculating on whose nose the baby would get and how that might impact her middle school experience. The psychological implications were haunting to boot; I imagined a big dot on the spectrum of sociopathy reserved for people who obsess over their unborn child’s appearance. It was around this time that I started wearing a gold cross necklace.

Deep down, though, I knew that my skepticism, my reluctance to participate in the conversation, was informed by personal history: I was an ugly baby. My parents love TELLING PEOPLE that I was an ugly baby. “A little old man!” I can’t even prove it to you because THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF ME… BECAUSE I WAS UGLY. Then, allegedly, one day when I was like, two, my mom and dad looked at me and said, “Oh my God, she’s actually pretty!”

My husband Andrew wasn’t the cutest either. He, too, blossomed into a pinchable darling in toddlerhood. And so I welcomed what seemed, to me, our logical fate: We would have an ugly baby.

To get in front of it, I made it my pregnancy bit. This gave people permission to say it to my face—to really laugh WITH me, not at me when she arrived kicking, screaming, and breaking mirrors. Everyone calls babies ugly behind their parents’ backs, anyway. It’s fucking funny. With my authority as a former ugly baby, it became my mission to get everyone in my life to loosen up about it knowing children are inherently beautiful gifts, even when they look like Winston Churchill.

At 40 weeks, I dumped hot sauce on rice and bounced on an exercise ball until the pain arrived in torrential five-minute increments. It was time to cross the rubicon. What she might look like was the last thing on my mind.

A traumatic labor turned into an elective c-section. I was in a fugue state from drugs and exhaustion. Seven layers of sliced abdomen later, they showed me my daughter, and in a sobering, full-circle moment, I shouted, “Oh my God, she’s actually pretty!”

How could this be? I thought. Of course, c-section babies don’t have their heads smushed in the birth canal, so they tend to be… tidier? More symmetrical? Either way, though, I was supposed to birth the punchline. Everyone was supposed to laugh. But there’s nothing funny about wide-set eyes, a defined cupid’s bow, a singular dimple, and the very tea profile we saw on the ultrasound. Nothing funny at all.

Over the next few weeks, as Bianca took form, I noticed this air of surprise whenever people met her. My chatty old neighbor saw us on the porch one morning and popped over. “Wow, she’s beautiful,” she said, “way more than I expected!” Excuse me?

I’d post pictures of her to my Instagram story and people would reply, “HOW? 😍” Bitch, wym HOW!?!?!?! Only I was allowed to be surprised by my baby’s beauty, and yet no one could hide their cruel confusion!

Eventually they started saying the quiet part out loud: that my baby is the spitting image of my husband. Not a drop of me in sight, save for the dirty blonde hair that I, too, had as a tike. Even their body type is a match; he is 6’3 to my 5’4, and Bianca continues to measure in the 90th+ percentile for length. My genes never stood a chance.

I always loved the name Bianca because it conjured the image of the ultimate muse, Bianca Jagger. Mick and Bianca. <3 In Italian, Snow White is called Biancaneve. I loved the way it translated with Lupo to “white wolf.” So maybe there is a bit of nominative determinism at work. Maybe I was destined to get mogged by my daughter, whom the doctor said “might tower over me by the time she’s 12.” She is a pretty baby.