My Baby's Scowl Made Him A Local Celebrity. Turns Out, He Got It From Me

In the delirium of the newborn months, my partner, Megan, and I found ourselves completely bereft of anything interesting to say, apart from running commentary on our one subject and singular focus: the baby. Even in our rare moments without said baby, we mostly talked about him. To entertain ourselves, we even did micro-impressions of the baby — an eager face here, a squawk there; a shake of a limb; a full-body wiggle. The joke being not just that the baby was so hilarious, but that the uncanny accuracy of these impressions — the genius of them — would be lost on anyone who wasn’t us.

Little did we know that while we precision-tuned our impersonations of this special creature, our newborn was hard at work developing his precise impressions of us. These impressions would prove to be cutting and gutting. Turns out babies are out there mimicking expressions, inheriting facial features, and also practicing their tight-five impressions of their parents. They’re revealing — through whatever mechanism of their observation or their inheritance of a particular set of the jaw — qualities about ourselves that we did not know. Expressions that we had thoughtfully suppressed, habits we thought we’d carefully concealed.

Octavia and I trade watching each other’s babies every week and chat constantly about their trajectory of our kids’ expressions. Octavia worries K has mimicked Octavia’s way of breathing and, thus, will also mimic her chronic sinus issues. More charmingly, to me, Octavia also points out K’s grunt while lifting things: “I think they get that from me.” (I will neither confirm nor deny, but I will confirm.) Octavia and their partner Marlene sent a photo of 1-year-old K trying a puree for the first time to a mutual friend. Our mutual friend wrote back immediately, “Awwww, they look just like Marlene!!” In the photo, K was pursing every inch of their face in grotesque disappointment, which gave Marlene much to purse her lips about.

My college roommate, Emma, notes that while few people are comfortable wielding a direct criticism of a fellow adult, they’re absolutely relaxed about assessing your baby. Emma lives in Oxford, England, and has the same wrinkle-nose smile as her kid Gene. She’d always known this about the both of them. And yet, she reports that people are constantly saying to her: “What a funny smile he has with his wrinkled nose. How odd that he does that.” She’s not bothered about her smile or Gene’s but is amused that they had no problem criticizing him. People spare us their assessments of us, but they don’t spare us their critiques of our baby children, who happen to look exactly like us.

Having a kid is “like having your embarrassment live outside of your body.”

Back in the States, I’ve had the great, distinct pleasure of hearing a rumor from my friend about my kid’s face: All the librarians at our branch call him “boss baby.” In the elevator, months after I first heard whispers of this nickname, a security guard informed me that my kid “always looks so corporate.” And I’ll admit, while my son has an incredible deck of nuanced expressions, when he walks into an unfamiliar place, he looks like he’s conducting a performance review. If this were the description of an adult, I might pass along the feedback. But babies can get away with anything.

I’d happily embrace my baby becoming a local celebrity for his dubious scowl, if not for the fact that everyone I love is simultaneously melting down about how much we look like each other. My friend in Los Angeles cried on FaceTime because he and I look so similar. A few times, nosy stranger will guess whether my partner or I carried by baby, and announce to me: “Well, he has your face.”

Now, I can put one and two together. When I finally confronted my friends and asked them if I’m often looking dubious. The general response was something like “Hmmm, well, yes.”

This is a new form of self-consciousness, I find. In Katie Yee’s upcoming novel Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, she builds on the oft-used description that having a kid is like having your heart outside of your body. Having a kid, she writes, is also “like having your embarrassment live outside of your body.” I’ve realized, in the past several months of walking around with an expressive, scowling, beaming creature who looks like me, that I am less poker-faced than I’d believed.

And the shockingly accurate impersonations don’t limit themselves to facial expressions. My friend Allie always hoards tissues in her pocket, which she never really admitted to herself. Then, doing laundry recently, she checked her 6-year-old’s pockets and found a zine’s worth of freshly hoarded, folded tissues. Mimicry or genuine scarcity panic, Allie could not say, but she was embarrassed for both of them.

“When she really loses it, I feel that pang of fear in myself of losing control, and I fear she got what fragility she has from me.”

My friends who have older kids report seeing these mirror selves on more harrowing emotional levels. My friend Emily, who brags flagrantly about her brazen listlessness, has a 3-year-old with astonishing energy, gregariousness, and confidence. But, Emily says, “When she really loses it, I feel that pang of fear in myself of losing control, and I fear she got what fragility she has from me.”

My friend Esme finds it overwhelming to see her 2-year-old in extreme emotions that replicated ones that she now keeps close to her chest. When her son is extremely happy, he clenches his teeth into a smile and tightens his whole body until he shakes. “While I reign in my enthusiasm now, I remember this feeling and my parents have several photos of me looking happy to the point of crazed, squeezing my baby brother as he winces.” Much more wrenching, when he’s in tantrums, Hank will bang his head on the floor, which Esme learned that she did as well. It’s awful, she says, but comforting to know that she moved through the same habit. “I find myself feeling both guilty and so close to him about it,” she says. Esme had forgotten about the extremity of these expressions, and Hank reminded her. These things feel impossible that our kids would have picked up on them, they’re mirroring something they haven’t seen.

I’ve spent the first year of baby-raising deeply impatient for expressions and evident personality. Each new face (interrogatory, plotting for peek-a-boo, cackling, delight overload, attempting to play it cool but failing) arrives to a great celebration. And I realize, just as the expressions of Esme’s tantrums were lost to her until her son echoed them, that many of his early faces might fade into obscurity. For now, I have a baby who moves through the world with a scowl — his default face until something stirs him from his worries. This is one of my favorite things about the scowl: how easily fleeting it is. People will march up to him in the grocery store and say “so serious,” which then ignites an incandescent, toothy grin.

When I finally read Susie Boyt’s 2023 novel about family and baby-rearing, Love and Missed, a passage in which the protagonist ruminates about baby faces stuck with me: “I sometimes found babies a bit cynical round the edges.” But of her granddaughter, Lily, she says: “It was so generous of her to think everything was funny… She understood that in the grand scheme of things, she had been born yesterday.” Perhaps it’s very respectful of my baby to approach every room with serious assessment, until literally anyone goes up to talk to him and he grins grins grins like he can’t remember what he took seriously.

*Names changed to protect baby privacy.

Maggie Lange writes about culture, style, books, art, salty food, and other things she loves for The New York Times, New York magazine, and others. She also writes the newsletter Purse Book, about tiny books that fit in purses and being a gal on the go.