Former Married At First Sight star Domenica Calarco has sparked a heated online parenting debate dubbed Babygate after publicly shaming her daughter's father for attending a friend's wedding instead of her first birthday.
The Australian reality television personality unleashed her frustration on social media after the father of her one-year-old daughter, Dove, chose to serve as a groomsman at a mate's wedding rather than celebrate the milestone. Calarco and her former partner are no longer in a relationship.
Calarco claimed the situation was made worse because the father had accepted the groomsman role months in advance while knowing the exact date of their daughter's birthday. Although he spent the morning of the birthday with Calarco and Dove before travelling to the wedding, Calarco doubled down on her frustration online, declaring that spending only the morning together was simply not enough.
She explained that she had pictured the three of them spending the entire day together as a family, suggesting activities like visiting a local zoo or aquarium to build shared memories despite no longer being a couple.
Defending the Father's Decision
The public controversy has drawn widespread attention online, prompting Australian columnist Jonica Bray to enter the debate in defense of the father. Writing as a mother of five children, Bray said she felt qualified to weigh in after organizing numerous birthday parties over the years, complete with entertainers, lavish cakes, and goodie bags thrust into the chubby hands of happy kids as they headed home.
Bray agreed that first birthdays are memorable milestones, noting you never forget the big ones. However, she argued that attending a long-standing wedding commitment as a groomsman is vastly different from skipping a child's birthday for a better offer at the pub.
Calarco asked social media users whether she was being overdramatic about the situation. Bray responded that while asking the internet makes the topic fair game, Calarco was indeed being overdramatic. Bray noted that while feeling disappointed when planned events do not follow the script is understandable, making the leap from disappointment to publicly shaming the father for a choice that really is not that outrageous was excessive.
Bray highlighted an obvious solution that appeared to be lost amid the online outrage, suggesting the family could simply celebrate Dove's birthday on another day. She pointed out that a one-year-old child does not know it is Tuesday, does not know her father is at a wedding, and will not know if the celebration is moved to Sunday.
Flexible Birthday Celebrations
Moving family birthday celebrations to fit busy schedules is a common practice in many households. Bray shared that her own family frequently relocates birthday celebrations when an anniversary falls midweek or at an inconvenient time, noting lightheartedly that while nobody is officially altering birth certificates, she would not mind that option herself given that her own birthday falls on December 30, the night before New Year's Eve.
Sharing a recent example, Bray explained that her youngest child turned two years old just two weeks ago. Due to work commitments and sports schedules for her older children, the family was not returning home until 6:00 pm, leaving only one hour before the toddler's routine 7:00 pm bedtime.
Rather than rushing the celebration, the family moved the birthday party to the weekend. They presented the toddler with a $5 beach toy and a mudcake purchased from Australian supermarket chain Coles, and the child was completely happy with the arrangement.
Travelling During Milestone Birthdays
To further illustrate her point, Bray revealed her own past experience with milestone birthdays, admitting that she missed the first birthday of her eldest daughter, Caja. While her firstborn was turning one in Sydney under the care of Bray's mother, Bray was travelling abroad in India.
During her Indian journey, Bray booked flights to India, visited the Taj Mahal, floated down the Ganges river in Varanasi, and bought bangles in the city of Jaipur. While Bray was swanning around India, her daughter not only celebrated her first birthday without her mother present, but also took her very first steps.
Bray brought her daughter back a souvenir snow globe picked up from a market near the Taj Mahal, noting that somehow both mother and daughter survived the trip. Fast-forwarding 17 years, Caja is now an 18-year-old university student studying civil engineering.
Long Term Perspective on First Birthdays
Bray revealed that Caja has never once confronted her mother about the trauma of her absence on the first anniversary of the day she was born, demonstrating that missing the occasion did not derail her development. Looking back, Bray recalled being in a painfully earnest first-child phase focused on avoiding sugar, joking that her daughter probably only missed out on a watermelon slice anyway.
Reflecting on childhood memories, Bray asked how often adults actually pull out photographs from their early birthdays. She noted that she has only ever seen one photo of herself with a birthday cake, taken around age five while sitting on her great-grandfather's knee, and admitted she still wonders whether the cake was actually for his birthday rather than hers.
Concluding her reflection, Bray emphasized that while first birthdays are lovely milestones worth celebrating, they mean far more to parents than to the infant whose name is written on the cake.
