There’s no denying that there are a lot of babies out there that are ugly as hell.  I suppose that in the end the love you feel as a parent of your newborn child blinds you from seeing the truth; or possibly your opinion of what makes a baby beautiful is just different than every other single human being on the planet.  In any event, it will greatly benefit your baby if you just admit – once and for all – that he or she is damn ugly.  Here’s why:

Reason #1:  Admitting that your baby is ugly as all hell will make you more aware of how much ridicule your baby will be up for when you share his or her photographs all over the Internet.  In the digital age, parents have become out of control with the sharing of baby pictures online.  If you’re like me, you have ghads of friends sharing their baby photos (the majority of which are actually adorable) on every social network and other online sharing site they can.  The problem with this, though, is that if your baby is truly ugly, those photographs are being pirated by humor sites, like SomeUglyBaby.com.  Potentially, your ugly assed infant is being put up for ridicule by thousands (if not millions) of Internet users, just because you couldn’t admit to yourself that the kid is fugly and that you should ratchet down the public photo sharing as a result.  Share with close family and closer friends; keep it off Flickr public view.

Reason #2:  Admitting that you have a less-than-beautiful baby will inspire you to avoid gimmicky shit, like hideous hats or poses at professional photo shoots.  Let’s face it, when you have a drop-dead gorgeous baby, you could put a pile of dog feces on the kid’s head and it would still look adorable.  But when your baby is ugly, different rules apply.  Placing a gimmicky and stupid-looking prop on the kid’s head for your annual trip to get your free 8X10 from the Sears Photo Center is just going to make your baby look even uglier.  Eventually, your kid is going to outgrow that ugly phase of their life – very likely somewhere during childhood or early puberty.  But there will always be a collection of hideous photographs to immortalize their once-upon-a-time ugliness.  Why make it worse with horrific props?

Reason #3:  Admitting that your baby makes a gargoyle look attractive will stop you from forcing your friends to lie to your face, and (even worse) on those horrible “cutest baby” contests.  Every day some asshole friend of mine is posting for the 100th time one of those “vote for the cutest baby” Gerber contest entries on Facebook or Google+, with the request that I vote for their kid daily until the contest is over.  Not only is asking someone to go back and vote every, single day a bit rude, but to ask me to lie and say the kid is cute, when in fact it is hideous, is just not cool.  Worse is when I go to a friend’s house and they shove the kid in my face, asking “..isn’t he cute?  Isn’t he just adorable?  Don’t you just want to pinch those little cheeks?!”  My natural response to this would be “…cheeks?  I can’t see past the eleven layers of chin!” – but instead I stick with “oh, yes – he’s lovely.”  I would never ask a friend or family member if they thought my kid was cute.  Why, you ask?  Because I would be utterly destroyed if they said “no.”  Further, I would be even more utterly destroyed if my someone I trusted had lied to me, even about just how terrifying my newborn child was to look at.

Reason #4:  Finally, if you admit that your baby is ugly, you will be more apt to notice things that are easily fixable in the early stages – preventing your child from a lifetime of ridicule.  Your baby have a piece of skin flap hanging over part of his eye?  Admit that your baby is ugly and you will get this taken care of when it is simple and relatively painless, rather than later on after it has screwed up the kid’s vision and he’s been subject to years of bullying by kids that call the skin flap his conjoined twin.  Your ugly-as-hell baby have a mole on her forehead that resembles the Virgin Mary?  Have that shit cut off and the scar will be virtually unnoticeable by the time she’s five (whereas leaving the mole will just result in it continuing to stretch, grow, get uglier, demand veneration, possibly give birth to another mole resembling Jesus; and finally, probably become cancerous when your child is an adult).  Admitting to yourself that the little uglinesses of your baby are, in fact, ugly is rife with possibilities of what you can do to fix the things that may make your kid suffer a lot less ridicule as time goes on.

Ultimately, we all want to accept the human body for what it is; to admit that we are humans and thus flawed, and accept that we are who we are.  But isn’t that an unbelievable crock of shit?  We live in a material world – a material world in which we are all very material girls.  To deny the impact that looks have on our society is to deny the very fabric of who we are.  More attractive people get paid better, get more opportunities, and are even liked and loved better.  That doesn’t mean we need to tell ugly adults they are ugly – because ultimately, as adults we are all relatively ugly in some way or another, and we also all develop our own patterns of beauty that may or may not be correlative to physical traits.  It just means that when we have an ugly baby, we should admit it and not set them up for even more ridicule so early on.  Life is full of bullies and bull shit.  Admitting that your baby is uglier than ugly will at least make the situation a little more realistic and less ridiculed from the get-go.