Crying in F-Mart

Trawling Facebook marketplace for baby gear and meaning

Of the many changes becoming a parent has brought into my life, one of the weirder ones is how much I suddenly find myself buying, selling, and simply lurking on Facebook marketplace. The Baby & Kids section is surprisingly tender, and there are a few item listings I always click on even though I’m not in the market for them.

Like the first birthday party kit. My research, largely conducted between the hours of 3 and 5 am while I’ve got my daughter attached to the tit, has determined that the most popular themes at the moment are:

• My berry first birthday (for girls)

• My beary first birthday (for boys)

• Hole in one (for dads)

• One silly goose

Honorable mention to the least poetic of these: One in a melon! (Which would actually be the coolest of them all if you went full Severance melon party.)

The secondary market on bespoke Etsy high chair banners is off the chain.

The high chair banners are ubiquitous, as are the balloon boxes.

The pathos of a balloon-less balloon box!!

There are dozens of these types of items, most in just a handful of themes, active right now in my city. The single-use mimicry of it all. I mean, hopefully the balloon arches and cupcake toppers all find second, third, fourth homes and feature prominently in many an Instagram tableau, but you have to imagine that for every person going to the trouble of trying to get $20 back on their party decor purchase, there are plenty more just tossing their stuff because it was cheap junk from Amazon or Shein and not worth the trouble.

There’s also the more metaphorical single-use in all these photos. The first birthday has come, it has gone, it will never be back, though it has been marked in the most thoughtful way the parents know how: with a theme that will be legible in social media carousels. The whole thing puts me in a mind of the Found Photos subreddit, where people post their thrift store and Goodwill bins finds:

Someone tucked each corner of these photos into their slots, and now that person is dead and their memories are in the hands of strangers.

I’d bum myself out picturing all the berry first birthday photos ending up in the hands of some curious but ultimately indifferent person at the Goodwill bins, but then I consider that people rarely print their photos anymore. In 2075 these will simply be littering unvisited Facebook pages.

Or maybe I’m being far too precious about this whole thing and imbuing these sales with emotions not felt by their participants. Perhaps I should be trying to see this as straightforwardly capitalist in nature. That’s somewhat easier to do with the breast pump listings.

This bad boy’ll run ya $220 at Target brand new, but there are Marketplace listings for $50-$100.

Pumps are expensive if you don’t have insurance covering the cost, so it makes sense that women want to get something back for their purchase, and that there’s a healthy market of women looking for pre-owned models to save some cash. I myself have wondered what I might be able to get for mine, the same model as in the photo above, given that it came with a superficial crack.

You could (and I do), however, read another story behind these pump sales. A story of mothers returning to work months before their babies are ready to wean. Of the best intentions to keep feeding their baby breastmilk but finding their workplace inhospitable and the work of keeping up with all the additional cleaning and sanitizing too onerous. I work at a company with multiple gently-lit nursing rooms stocked with bottle wash detergent, but I still feel indignant every time I go in there and take a call while hooked up to my milking machine, wondering if the brr-sht noise is audible to everyone else. What sorts of hopes or expectations informed the original purchase of a pump that’s been “used only a handful of times?”

I hope she finds a good home.

The last listing I can’t resist are the giant hauls. The “please make an offer I need this stuff gone” piles of baby gear.

These toys are haunted by a baby that got older and grew to find these toys boring. Just out of frame is a kindergartner who’s lost his baby fat and needs space cleared out for his legos and Lincoln logs.

They want $180 dollars for this stuff. I might be a misty eyed new parent but, uh, this pile ain’t worth that much.

There is tragedy in baby shoes, never worn, but apparently I’m also a sucker for baby shoes worn for the blink of an eye that is the first few months of a baby’s life. There is love latent in this pile of polyester.

Look, I know that baby gear takes up a lot of space and Facebook marketplace is an avenue for getting stuff out of your house while making a little pocket money. Our crib, two nursing pillows, a bunch of board books, baby toys, and enough clothes to keep our baby kitted out til she turns two came from a couple of families who were so grateful we were taking it off their hands and out of their storage units that they didn’t want any money for it. Hell, I’m only five months in and already have a pile of gear awaiting consignment drop off in my garage, mostly stuff purchased in the crazy newborn months when I was most susceptible to products advertising some sleep-related convenience or cure.

As with so much about the internet, my experience of the baby and kids section of Marketplace is determined by its essential anonymity. Because I don’t know anything about these people, I can project my own anticipatory nostalgia onto the baby stuff they don’t need anymore. And, you know, I’m also a little salty that my parents didn’t keep much of my baby clothes. 90s kid stuff is super in right now.