Good Babies

Issue 51 • Spring 2025 • Nonfiction

This essay won first place in the Spring 2025 Contest Issue judged by Jenn Shapland, who wrote: “I found ‘Good Babies’ charming and imaginative, yet tightly arranged and well-paced. It has emotional heft without being saccharine—a feat, given that the subject of motherhood is often highly sentimentalized. The author’s awareness of this exact trope is at the heart of the essay, and they use the photos they construct for a neoliberal infant portrait photography company to stage (and interrogate) the very sentiments that reinforce cultural beliefs about motherhood, fatherhood, babyhood, womanhood, queerness, and the nuclear family.”

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Love Babies? Have an artistic eye? An aptitude for sales? Here’s a perfect way to earn extra income: as a Newborn Sales Photographer. 

I’m twenty-nine, suntanned and strong, riding my bike along the Mississippi River to the hospital where I work. My job (part-time, hourly) is photographing newborn babies in the maternity ward and staging bedside photo sessions, sometimes within hours of birth. 

I don’t work for the hospital, but for a company that contracts with the hospital to sell baby pictures to new parents. When I applied for the job, I imagined it could be a simple way to fill the gaps in my finances. I needed a quick fix, and they hired me fast. I suspected my age and gender qualified me, in the eyes of this company, as someone likely to be comfortable around mothers and babies (I got the impression they only hired women) though I didn’t think of myself as particularly nurturing or domestic. I had no kids and didn’t want any; I had a boyfriend, but no clear future with him. My hair was long and shiny, but I kept one side of my head shaved. I was queer but didn’t know how to talk about it. I hadn’t yet let desire turn my life inside out. 

As I bike, I look across the river, where oil slicks swirl around a row of houseboats. A beaver cuts through the water, its slick brown back just visible above the surface. What if I lived in a houseboat? I think. What if I were a beaver? I imagine swimming into the underwater entrance of a den I built myself, mud-spackled walls, a nest of kits. Then I look at the paved path ahead and think What if I just kept going? Past downtown, past the hospital, past the docked barges and stacks of shipping containers, past the burial mounds at the edge of the city—sacred, silent, at least a thousand years old—then south on the river, an unfathomable distance, until the Mississippi and I both empty into saltwater. 

Instead, I signal my turn and pedal the hill to the hospital. At the entrance, I lock my bike to the rack, rows of mirror windows duplicating my reflection. Air conditioning dries the sweat from my face as I enter through automatic doors. In a bathroom stall, I peel off my bike clothes and change into black slacks and a purple polo shirt embroidered with a company logo.

A hospital-issued badge gets me in the elevator, up three floors, and through a set of double doors to the maternity ward, where the stale coffee-scented lobby is decorated with framed abstracts of mothers and babies rendered in thick pastel brushstrokes. Good morning, says the daytime receptionist, her staccato typing drowning out my response.

I scrub in, log on to the employee portal, and hang around the front desk until the receptionist prints me a list of rooms. She marks which ones are occupied and ready for a photo session, ready meaning the mother has sufficiently recovered from labor and the family is not known to be in crisis. I load a cart with a camera bag, laptop, job manual, and box of product samples, and push it down the halls, knocking on doors. 

When entering a room, I can usually gauge, within a few seconds, whether my presence is welcome. Many mothers look at me through suspicion-shielded eyes. Some are asleep, disoriented, or too sick for a photo shoot. Others, jubilant and alert, surrounded by flowers and gifts, meet my gaze with ease. Baby pictures are an easier sell when the mood is already celebratory.

I knock. 

Come in, says a tired voice from the other side of the door. 

Baby photographer, I announce myself, poking my head in.

This mother rocks a swaddled newborn while watching a football game on the mounted TV. She looks at me. I was hoping you were the snack cart.

I can see her exhaustion—eyelids heavy, sheets rumpled—but she responds with an undercurrent of bemused laughter when I ask if she’d like to do the photo shoot. Okay then. She strokes the baby’s cheek with the back of her index finger.

I maneuver my cart into the room and close the door behind me. The mother clicks down the TV volume. Her sheets are twisted to one side, leaving her legs partly uncovered. She’s wearing shiny orange gym shorts and knee-high compression socks. Pale blooms of blood are visible on the bottom sheet.

She wants to try nursing before the photos. She says it shouldn’t take long (this baby, she says, is a good latcher) and I’m welcome to stay in the room. 

I take my time washing my hands in the little sink, lathering pink hospital soap between every finger and down around each wrist. I pump the paper towel dispenser with my elbow, dry my hands, and tug on powdery sterile gloves. 

According to the whiteboard on the wall, this baby is a boy, born yesterday. When he finishes nursing, he screams for a moment before his mother slips the green hospital pacifier into his little bud of a mouth. 

I explain to her that the photo shoot will take place on and around the bed, so she won’t have to move. When the session is over, I’ll show her the photos, and she can pick her favorite to receive as a free digital image. Additional photo packages and keepsakes will be available for purchase. 

In every hospital room I visit, I run through the same song and dance. The basic camera skills I’ve picked up from various jobs turn out to be more than I need. The job manual—an inch thick in a white three-ring binder—includes a required set of poses for each shoot, including diagrams of exact camera settings for each pose. 

Pose Sequence 1: Mother Adores Baby

I arrange the bedding to cover the bloody spots and drape a spare sheet across the back of the bed to create a crisp, white backdrop. I ask the mother to look down at her baby. Click. Then, I ask her to shift him to her shoulder, facing out, for a full view of his face. Click.

I take out the green pacifier for a few seconds, snap photos before the baby realizes what’s happened, then put it back in his mouth before he begins to cry. This maneuver felt strange, even cruel, the first few times I tried it, but now it’s automatic. 

According to the job manual, I’m supposed to call every mother Mom instead of her name and speak directly to the mother versus the father or any other adult in the room. This is meant to strengthen the customer’s pride in being a mother and make her more enthusiastic about purchasing a custom photo album, canvas prints, pink or blue birth announcements. I can’t bring myself to do it, though. It feels cloying to speak to a stranger this way, and presumptuous to assume Mom is an accurate and adequate honorific for the person before me. 

When I was 18, I visited a cousin in the hospital who had just given birth to a daughter. As I sat in the hospital recliner holding the newborn baby, an uncle said to me, too loudly and too approvingly, That looks pretty natural on you, Kasey. I flushed with confusion. I was at first surprised and even flattered to be perceived as womanly, feminine, a potential mother. But then— and this is what stuck—I was angry. What did he know? Nobody had asked me whether I wanted children. Nobody said things like that to boy cousins. 

I don’t call this stranger Mom. I look at the whiteboard and call her by her name. 

Pose Sequence 2: Clouds

I make a nest at the foot of the bed: two pillows pushed together and draped with a sheet. I lift the baby out of his mother’s arms. 

I find it hard to believe I can just stroll into hospital rooms, plucking newborns out of their mothers’ arms like some oddball fairy godmother. Though I’ve been through a background check, safety training, and hospital security procedures, I still get nervous when I hold and pose babies. I go slow, breathe deep, and tamp down anxious visions of dropping them. 

I don’t know where this fear comes from. I’ve held plenty of babies. My motor skills and reflexes are intact. Maybe it’s my feeling that I’m not much of a baby person in conflict with this moment where, for everyone’s safety, I must be one hundred percent a baby person—every synapse attuned to this astounding and helpless being. 

I pick up the baby and place him, so slowly, into the pillow nest, which is meant to give the effect of the baby resting on a cloud. Click.

My boyfriend is 19 years older than me. We don’t want to have children together, that’s not the kind of relationship it is, but he tells me he doesn’t want a vasectomy. He still hopes to have children, not with me, but with someone else, someday. 

Some days, I feel stridently and proudly childfree. I see a sticker on someone’s water bottle that says STOP HAVING KIDS and think, yes. Other days, I just wish I could want something normal.

Pose Sequence 3: Stomach

I turn the baby onto his stomach. He curls up like a caterpillar inching toward the tree line. With one hand on the baby’s back, I adjust the camera lens, then squat to bed level and remove my hand. Click.

Months pass. I hold hundreds of babies. My boyfriend, a ceramic artist, struggles to pay rent. I write. I apply for grants, take on multiple jobs, and visit the Salvation Army on Wednesday mornings, where I can take home a load of free groceries in exchange for attending a church service.  

On these mornings, I sit in a pew, making to-do lists, daydreaming, and sometimes chatting with the people next to me. When I feel like it, I sing along with the hymns, all familiar to me, blocky white letters on a sunset background projected onto a screen. I haven’t gone to church on purpose in years, but these mornings at the Salvation Army, often the only moments of stillness in my week, feel like respite. 

When the service concludes, we proceed to the gym, where long folding tables bear fresh produce, boxes of pasta, baked goods, yogurt, trays of enchiladas—all surplus products from grocery stores and school cafeterias. There is so much food. Even after everyone has taken what they want, there’s so much left over, so much that will go to waste. 

Dumpsters fill. Babies are born. Grocery stores lock up canisters of baby formula, one of the most frequently shoplifted items. 

In the maternity ward, I photograph babies whose mothers look fifteen and fifty years old. There are twins and triplets, babies with several older siblings present, and babies who are their parents’ firstborn.

Sometimes, there’s a language barrier. I muddle through with my rudimentary Spanish and use Google Translate for Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Oromo, Mandarin, French. I carry flyers printed in various languages. This works well enough. There are interpreters around, but they work for the hospital; They aren’t supposed to assist me because I’m a vendor, not hospital staff. The daytime receptionist, understandably annoyed with the whole baby picture enterprise, tells me she thinks it’s wrong to take photos in any room where the listed primary language is anything other than English. When she hands me the list of occupied rooms at the start of my shift, she crosses out the rooms she personally feels I should not visit. I see where she’s coming from. I, too, worry that a language barrier could make it difficult to obtain informed consent, and could lead to confusion over whether going through with the photo shoot (and purchasing photos) is required of patients. But leaving people out of the chance to get photos taken because of their listed first language—isn’t that also unethical? 

The company I work for has its predatory qualities. At the same time, it’s based on a reasonable premise: the desire to commemorate peak experiences. Many of these parents could instead take decent photos with their smartphones for free, but then they’d miss out on the performance and pageantry of a bedside photo shoot. 

Maybe bells and whistles trotted out to make something feel special are worth a price. 

I knock. 

This room is full of family: siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—seated on the floor, leaning against the window, everyone waiting for their chance to hold the wailing newborn. 

The baby’s full-volume screams prickle my skin, electrify my blood. I’d do anything to make it stop. I breathe. Out the window, the river shimmers in the midday sun. 

Once returned to her mother, the baby quiets. I give my spiel. The photo shoot begins. 

Though the manual is specific, improvisation is often necessary. In this case, I invite the relatives to gather around the mother and child for the first few poses, then add some extra shots to allow for cousins who want a picture with the baby.

That day, I take a photo I’ll never forget. Four generations: baby, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—deep wrinkles divine against the white sheet backdrop. 

In any given moment, I’m not longing for parenthood. But there’s something here I grieve. I want to be a creature like any creature, making burrows, reproducing in family pods, driven by direct biological urges, following them, compelled uncritically toward the survival of the species. I want a tether to the past and future, a sense of living inside the ages. 

Pose Sequence 4: Dad

I knock. 

Sometimes, there’s a man in the room. Sometimes, he’s the baby’s father. 

We have a series of poses for that. 

From the pillow nest I’ve made for the cloud sequence, I ask the dad to pick up the baby. Leaning over the bed, I ask him to rest the baby on his forearm, stomach down like a cat on a branch. 

Some dads are shy about having the camera turned on them. Some flat-out refuse. But the dad poses that turn out, really turn out. In the second pose, the baby is face-up on Dad’s forearm, and in the third pose, Dad leans down to kiss the baby. These photos, if he can get into them, are beautiful, especially if this dad is burly, or tattooed, or bearded. I wonder if this photo sequence is meant to build to this emotional climax, the tender bonding of father and child. I admit, I’m captivated by these moments, as are the nurses and lactation specialists bustling in and out of the rooms. 

Why does seeing a father act sweetly toward his newborn baby come off as original?

It could have something to do with the uniquely physical bond of having carried the child (as in the case of mothers who’ve spent months growing the baby inside their bodies) versus the relative newness of the child to a father who hasn’t. But it has more to do, I think, with the dissonance between conventions of masculinity and this open display of nurture and awe. 

Would it be different if the dad had been the one to carry the child? 

Sometimes, the dad is the one to carry the child. After all, some trans people have uteruses, give birth, and are called Dad. The manual does not account for birthing fathers, non-birthing mothers, or any parenthood structure outside of one mother (the woman who carried the baby) and one father (the man who impregnated her). 

Five years later, I’m in a sweet queer partnership with someone who tried to have children with their ex. Using sperm banks and intrauterine insemination, the plan was for my partner’s former spouse to carry the child, and if that didn’t work, they (my partner) would try carrying. 

These attempts at pregnancy proved unsuccessful. Once, a pregnancy test came back positive, but the next day, a test read negative. My partner and their ex divorced and never had children, but when we start dating, years later, a tiny onesie still hangs in their closet. Screen-printed with a rainbow-striped heart and We Are Family in script font, it still has the price tag—$1.99 from the Target clearance rack.

In the maternity ward, I wonder how I would feel if I were the mother in the hospital bed. Would I demand to be called by my name, instead of the ubiquitous Mom? And what if my partner was not Dad but another Mom, and what if neither of those words applied? What if I were definitely Mom, but the child’s other parent had been the one to go through labor? Would I have fun carrying on with the Dad poses? Or would I be embarrassed to be slotted into a reductive role-play? 

I watch and wait for visibly queer families. I’m ready for anything: birthing parents who don’t want to be called Mom, moms who didn’t carry their child, dads who did, throuples, polycules, a pair of dads in the room with their surrogate. I’ve prepared myself, rehearsing the ways I’ll go off script to honor these families, but I don’t find them, at least not in the ways I’ve imagined. 

As it turns out, the mom in the gym shorts and compression socks, the one watching football in her bloodied sheets, is the gayest scenario I’ll encounter. As I transfer the photos I’ve taken from the camera to the laptop for the bedside slideshow, she leans back into her pillows and chuckles. The one time I make an exception and sleep with a man, I end up pregnant. She shakes her head, but a smile cracks across her face. Her baby sleeps peacefully on her chest. Something catches inside me. 

It’s not easy to be in these rooms, but sometimes it’s even harder to leave. Sometimes I’m hit with an uncanny calm—some sort of contact oxytocin high. Time becomes malleable. Half an hour feels like days. After a photo session, I emerge, blinking, trying to remember who I am. 

I don’t realize, at the time, that I have one year and three months until I leave the artist boyfriend; one year, three months, and two days until I download a dating app and set my preferences to Men and Women (there are only two options); and one year, three months, two days, and twenty minutes until I set my preferences to filter out men, and keep it that way, thinking to myself, I’m still young for a little while longer.

In four months, I quit the newborn photography job and get hired for a 9-to-5 at a nonprofit office. I befriend my coworkers, who make me laugh, and I realize—an epiphany—how lonely I’ve been. 

Through the office job, I get to know a 70-year-old woman named Isa and a 20-year-old man named Abdi who have become close friends while attending the same ESL class. When Isa talks about Abdi, she calls him her son, such a good boy, a good baby.

My coworkers and I like this so much that we start calling each other good baby as a term of endearment. I’m headed to lunch, good baby. 

Could one of you good babies review my draft?

I’ll finish this email before I leave today.

Okay, good baby.

Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

I knock. This time, I’ve been dispatched to the NICU, two floors down. Per the company’s contract with the hospital, photographers never venture to the NICU unless the family specifically requests a photo session. Today, someone has made this request. Wearing a mask and gloves, I look up at a security camera as I wait to be buzzed in. 

This baby is maybe 10 inches long and can’t be removed from the incubator. Nothing in the manual applies to this photo shoot—not the camera settings, or poses, or slideshow, or script. 

I do my best to get decent portraits through the plexiglass, trying different camera settings to reduce glare. Click. I worry the mother will be upset by these poor-quality photos. But she isn’t concerned with that. She’s been in the hospital for days, closely monitored along with her baby, and she seems relieved by the change of pace the photo shoot provides. And she wants the photos, despite the limited composition and plexiglass glare, despite the fact that her child’s eyes are not open. Click. She buys prints in multiple sizes.

All my life, I’ve had pregnancy and childbirth dreams. In some, I’m in a candlelit birthing room redolent with essential oils. In dreams, I’ve birthed cats and dogs, and once, a small human baby onto a paper plate, which I threw in the trash. The setting of the candlelit dreams are the spaces of my grandmother’s deaths—rooms made comfortable for their dying. 

Some babies don’t make it. Stillbirth photo shoots are part of the job, but, per the manual, it’s okay to opt out of this particular request. Such an occasion never comes my way, but just in case, I ready myself. I make myself a quiet promise: if asked, I will say yes. 

What was meant to be a low-investment side gig has invaded my bloodstream, shaken my organs. I’m jittery, hypervigilant, often close to tears. I dream of babies, of dropping them. 

I dream: Hi, Mom! Congratulations on your new baby! 

I dream: Every baby deserves a beautiful portrait!

I dream: Would you like to purchase our beautiful $399 boxed set? 

I help my boyfriend set up for craft fairs. I break one of his best mugs. I get myself a happy lamp. I reheat enchiladas from the Salvation Army and check my bank account every hour. I imagine myself as big and soft as a squid, flopping through the maternity ward, tripping over my many limbs, disconnecting IVs, spilling bassinets. 

One night, after a full day of photographing babies, I go out for dinner with my boyfriend. We sit on a patio overlooking the river. Barges make their slow procession. Seagulls peck around our feet. I peer into the distance, looking for the houseboats, wanting to see their quiet tetheredness. We order drinks, and I get a text from a fellow photographer, asking me to cover her shift the next day. I’m tired and I don’t want to, but her baby is sick. 

Just say no, says the boyfriend. 

But what is she supposed to do? 

I’ve had a couple of sips of gin and tonic, and I don’t want any more. Tell her no, he says again.

He knows nothing about me, I think. I drop my drink to the ground, on purpose, so the glass cracks. 

I leave the table and start running home along the river. He follows, and when he catches up with me, I scream—loud enough for the people at a nearby dog park to look up—compostable bags of poop in their hands. 

Years later, on a late-night car ride back from a trip to northern Wisconsin, my new partner and I will talk about babies. I’ve never felt quite resourced enough to be a parent, they admit, though they had come so close to having a child with their ex. 

I say maybe there’s a part of me that would like to make a family, but I can’t instinctively, logistically, or economically imagine having children of my own. 

There is grief in this conversation: the last sliver of light behind a swiftly closing door. There is joy in this conversation: visions of a future we want instead. Traveling together, making dinner for friends, channeling caregiving energy into our community. 

The final flourish of the bedside photo sessions is the slideshow, which is also the sales pitch. After I’ve made my way through all the pose sequences in the manual, I stay in the room, download the photos onto a laptop, do a few quick Photoshop adjustments, and plug them into a template set to canned instrumental music. 

The mom in the shiny gym shorts—who has revealed herself to be a blissed-out lesbian overjoyed at the prospect of single parenthood after a one-time encounter with a man—asks me to roll my cart right up to her bedside for the slideshow so she can have the best view.

Here, on the screen, is a mother adoring her baby. Here is a baby, mouth open, tiny fist curled to his cheek. Here is a moment, ephemeral as a cloud: wrinkled baby feet, puckered thighs, eyes open in what stands for wonder, the moment before he cries. 

I stand in the shadows as the slideshow plays, biting my lip and taking deep breaths to make it less obvious that I’m maybe crying. I’m emotional over the arrival of a stranger’s child, blinking back tears despite the corporate slideshow template and muzak. This moment is deeply not about me. And yet, and yet, it is. 

There are a couple of scenarios in which I could imagine myself as a parent, where that impossible puzzle piece could magically fit: extreme utopia or extreme dystopia. Utopia: no worries about money, abundant safety and education, flourishing gardens, clear lakes, rushing rivers, and many trusted adults around to help care for children. Dystopia: traveling on foot through the desert because everywhere is a desert now. Civilization in total collapse. A baby tied to my chest with a length of cloth, I set traps to catch rabbits and squirrels. The baby breastfeeds. I must stay nourished. For shelter, I build us a dwelling from wood I’ve gathered, spackling the walls with mud. Nobody is sentimentalizing, commodifying, or gendering this. We only have each other, this baby and I, and we keep each other alive. There’s no one on Earth to love except for this good baby.

Issue 50 • Fall 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry