I refuse to post a picture of my baby on Facebook

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CON: My extended friendship circle doesn't get to see amazing moments like these.

In my Facebook newsfeed, it's common for brand-new parents to post pictures of their babies as a modern-day birth announcement. I love these posts. I love getting updates on how the baby and mother are doing, and I love cute pictures because I am a human being with a beating heart in my chest. But bad news for my Facebook friends: I won't be posting pictures of my baby on Facebook.

There are pros and cons to this policy.

Pro: The smugness of privacy

It always felt to me that people who really value their privacy are very important and also have a huge amount of self-control. Like the really cool celebrities. Or people who don't even have Facebook. Oh man, I wish I could be one of those people.

Instead, I periodically pretend like I don't have Facebook, feel like a million bucks for a week, then cave like that scene in Flight and binge on my newsfeed for a few hours. I am not important, and I constantly overshare. I have almost posted baby pictures a few times, but the thing that stopped me, more than my husband's insistence and my own fear of his image being misappropriated, is the delicious smugness I feel.

Con: What's the use of feeling smug if people don't even know how cute he is?

Beyonce probably feels great about people not seeing pictures of Blue Ivy because everybody knows about Blue Ivy. If nobody knows about my baby, there's no way for them to be impressed that I haven't posted pictures of him.

This reminds me of when I started college. I sent a lot of e-mails to my close high school friends, detailing all the new friends I was making and experiences I was having. I was obsessive about communicating the minutiae of my college experience because I felt like if my old friends didn't know about it, it didn't happen. Now this is true on a much larger scale. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to Instagram it, did it really happen?

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I refuse to post a picture of my baby on Facebook