Baby clothes

Having (justifiably, I think) skipped our friends' wedding yesterday afternoon, we stopped by the reception, our first social outing as a new family. I'm accustomed to the difficulty of interpreting certain vibrations in social space, given my own tendency to refract these vibrations through personal prisms of unease, but stepping out onto the interpersonal stage for the first time as a parent, I was unprepared for how much more mind-torquing bad vibes can be when it's not just you but your baby who's being judged. Like, if a friend says "...little cupcake" in response to the cupcake applique on the cardigan Tessa is wearing, and their general affect and tone seem to infuse the remark with irony and disapproval, like, "weird clothing choice," and this friend's personal taste in baby clothes runs more vintage ebay/boutiquey/pretend-it's-40-years-ago and seems just by example indirectly disdainful of mass-cultural, normative Babies R Us-wear, is the apparent hostility really just a reflection of my own ambivalence toward dressing my daughter in a frilly pink thing with a cupcake logo, or am I correct in sensing criticism and discomfort?

Allow me to discuss for a minute our choice to roll with the generic, over-the-counter baby clothes of 2010. Let's set aside arguments of practicality—that it was convenient to get most of Tessa's wardrobe as baby shower gifts, that we derive no personal enjoyment from the task of unearthing vintage gear, and that we happen not to be hooked into a reliable pipeline of tasteful hand-me-downs—and get to the ideological crux of the matter: dressing your child in commercial, traditionally gender-coded baby clothes gives her more autonomy than does a wardrobe curated to match what you, as an adult with developed taste, might personally wear. Believe me, I find threadbare cords and grubby old sweaters unbearably charming. But it's freeing to suspend your vision of coolness and let your baby be the world's baby for a while (I mean, she is anyway). Be as much of an elitist as you need to about experience, culture, learning, and nutrition—you want her to grow well, and this will require selective snobbery—but there's a difference between guiding the development of an intelligent being that has powers of agency and decorating a helpless possession. For to be unique and authentic does not require unique and authentic clothing chosen by someone else. (The same goes for choosing a name: the name is a container, and it can start out totally empty, and then it gets filled by a person. It's almost like some parents worry that a regular name won't be big enough for a non-regular person, as if they're front-loading the name because they don't trust their child, but isn't this the opposite of how language usually works, like, the more specific the word, the smaller its poetic world? I think of my friend John. For me, his name is a overflowing rainbow-range of connotation; an utterance of this syllable, however common, does not fail to call up his once-in-the-universe particularity. His parents did not attempt to reflect this particularity with an equally unique identifier; this would have been a category mistake, a confusion regarding the proper deployment of mimesis.) So let your child present as a decent, unassuming citizen of the world, and let her define herself with her abilities and actions. Like, if she's going to be the best in her class, let her be the best at sackbut, Go, Farsi, or Spenser, but not the best at being dressed by someone else.