I have a confession, and I fear it’s an unpopular admission.
On Friday evening Beyonce took to Instagram and revealed, for the first time, a photograph of her cradling her twins Rumi and Sir.
The image is everything you would expect from Queen Bey and I’m afraid I cringed when I first saw it.
She is standing in the lushest of gardens, with an archway generously dotted with roses and colourful blooms directly behind her. In the distance, the ocean forms the backdrop.
Her stature is unmistakable: it is befitting of a goddess. Her one-month old twins lie together, peacefully, in her arms as she gazes down the lens.
Has the world ever seen a mother like this?
Her skin is impossibly luminous, her legs, revealed in all their glory, impossibly taut. So too her hair, her abdomen, her babies. It is all so impossibly perfect.
Which is why I initially cringed upon seeing it.
It is as far from a realistic depiction of the post-partum fog mere mortals enjoy as any photo I’ve ever seen. And it was that realisation, actually, that made me enjoy the image far more.
Beyonce is no mere mortal: she is a global superstar of epic proportions and she is married to a superstar.
Her world is as far removed from the reality you and I might call our lives as humanly possible – with or without twins.
For any another woman who has given birth in recent months, who may well have been scrolling through Instagram in the middle of the night whilst feeding the fruits of that birth, the snap of Beyonce may well have been a little maddening to stumble upon.
Whilst some of us celebrate putting some tinted moisturiser and mascara on four weeks into our lives as mothers as a victory, here Beyonce is at her absolute finest soon after giving birth to twins.
“Whilst some of us celebrate putting on tinted moisturiser and mascara four weeks after birth, here Beyonce is at her absolute finest”
Georgie Dent
It’s hard not to wonder whether she is a different species to the rest of us – as if her DNA is made up of stardust. Because for most intents and purposes it may as well be.
Beyonce occupies a rarefied world. A world in which introducing her babies couldn’t be as simple as sharing a shot of her and Jay-Z in the delivery room, looking exhausted and exhilarated in the way only time giving birth can deliver.
An elaborate, styled shoot was the only viable option for Queen Bey to introduce Sir and Rumi to the world.
While plenty of us, myself included, might envy her luscious locks or her body, how many of us actually envy the celebrity?
It is one, luxurious, thing to dream about having your hair and make-up done a few weeks into the endurance marathon of living with a newborn, but it’s another thing entirely to need it to exit the house.
The contrast between social media imagery and real life is well documented.
What so many of us present on Instagram is one dimension of life: taken from our best angle, tempered with the gentlest of filters, selected with great care. Through social media we are curating a gallery of our lives, and ourselves, at their very best.
And so it is with Beyonce and her babies: except the effect is multiplied exponentially given she has 104 million followers on Instagram alone.
To anyone in doubt of the difference between mere mortals post-babies and Ms Knowles, may I point you in the direction of Instagram? Mums, from around the world, are doing their best to replicate Beyonce’s snap and the resulting images are perfect.
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