As journalist who writes about parenthood, I regularly receive pitches for baby products that test the boundaries of my sentimentality. Most of them register as adorable but unnecessary; a tiny minority are genuinely good ideas. Then there are those that I absolutely can’t stand. Almost always, these fall under the category of memory devices: virtual and physical creations designed to capture a moment in a child’s, or fetus’, life for perpetuity.
The latest trinket to harden my heart is the Gender Reveal Bear from My Baby’s Heartbeat Bear, a company which specializes in stuffed animals that come with a 20-second red heart battery recorder that captures the sound of baby’s heartbeat during an ultrasound. They are marketed as pregnancy keepsakes, and some even include a 3x5 frame for an ultrasound picture. The new Gender Reveal Bear has this feature, comes in pink and blue, and arrives in a “gender neutral” (which is to say half-pink, half-pink blue) box that’s meant to conceal the color of the bear inside and presumed sex of the fetus in the mother’s uterus.
Exegesis on the creepiness of this particular item would be gratuitous, even petty, if it didn’t so perfectly capture what turns me off about a lot of early parenthood merchandise. First off, there’s the gender reveal component, a tradition that Slate’s Jessica Winter excoriated earlier this year. Trying to identify the sex of one’s fetus is one of the first entry points into the rather abstract, and terrifying for first-time parents, concept that is a potential child. I understand why such knowledge comes with a sense of relief, spurious as it may be. But the ritualization of the gender announcement turns this knowledge into a loaded affair, one in which the unborn are reduced to problematic notions of gender identity and then saddled up with attendant expectations.
Also, the My Baby’s Heartbeat Gender Reveal Bear is part of a budding industry producing strange, even lurid keepsakes related to pregnancy and early parenthood. One can now buy a kit for taking a plaster cast of their pregnant belly, make a 3D mold of their fetus, or commission custom jewelry that incorporates sonogram images, breast milk, or baby teeth. (The human hair jewelry adored by those body-fetishizing Victorians would be in good company.)
The message behind this niche corner of capitalism is that pregnancy and early childhood is so precious, so fraught, that women must have these little biological commodifications in order to remember—and, even worse, to know what they should be remembering in the first place. The more prescriptive the world is about what should matter during this period, the less women will free to figure out which parts of pregnancy and early parenthood matter to them. It’s a time of life that’s overloaded with both drudgery and transcendence. These keepsakes, along with all the other hot tips on how to document it all, make it all too easy to for the search for transcendence to become an act of drudgery.
One last question about the Gender Reveal Heartbeat Bear: Who exactly is it for? The fact that it is a teddy bear suggests it is for the child, after he or she is born. But the fact that it is the carrier of the fetus’s heartbeat and ultrasound image suggests that it is for the pregnant woman. Practically, how might one incorporate such an item into one’s life? I, a twice-pregnant woman, would feel strange cozying up with a stuffed simulacrum of my fetus while the actual fetus, and their heart, thrums inside of me. (And I, the haver of a single miscarriage, can’t imagine having felt much relief by snuggling with the heartbeat of a fetus who never made it.) The whole thing feels infantilizing, which is something that happens to pregnant women and mothers of young children too often already. Mommy stuffies won’t help.
The sentimental desire to document a child’s growth, in-utero or after birth, is not foreign to me. My cynicism surrounding keepsake mementos in no way carries over to my desire to experience my child up-close and attempt to capture, for perpetuity, the radiant moments. But the thing is, these moments have nearly all come as a surprise. Over these past four years of my son’s life, I’ve been surprised by what mattered to me, surprised by what mattered to him, and surprised by the parts that changed and the parts that haven’t. It’s the emphemerality, the unpredictability, that makes this so sweet, and not the cataloging of his life into photo books or keepsake memorabilia that tell you what matters before you can figure it out for yourself. I have no recording of his heartbeat in-utero, but it’s no matter. That babum, babum is mine to listen to every night as I wrap him in his blanket, kiss him on his forehead, and send him off to sleep.
