On waiting

Particularly now that I'm showing (19 weeks today, thank you), the first thing many people ask is if we know what we're having. What I want to say is "either a girl or a boy," but generally I'll say "no, but we don't want to know."

Our sonogram is in about three weeks, and we could find out, but since before we started trying to have a baby Phillip and I agreed that we would wait until the baby is born to learn the gender. The argument has been made that it's a surprise whether you find out now or later, which is true, but we come at it from multiple angles.

1) Cliche at it may sound, we want a healthy baby--boy or girl--and that is what's most important. No gender reveal parties for us. The baby is enough.

2) We have so much knowledge at our fingertips in this modern world, and we have become so impatient. We know we have to wait until October to meet the baby, so we can wait to learn the baby's sex, as well.

3) We're both turned off by pink and blue, those clearly drawn lines of gender for newborns. You go to the store and the division is clear. The child's identity is written in advance through frilly dresses or onesies that say "ladies man." And maybe the child, if she's a girl, will want to wear a tutu every day or the child, if he's a boy, will love tractors and race cars. But, like Scott Russell Sanders wrote in his essay/letter to his daughter, "To Eva, on Your Marriage," "We would rear you purely as a child, neither girl nor boy, so that you might grow like a tree in full sunlight, taking on your natural shape. ... We would put before you the whole rainbow of human possibilities, and let you choose." Yes, a girl can be independent and courageous in pink and a boy can be kind and thoughtful in blue, but I'm not going to allow their futures painted out for them from birth.

4) I don't need to know the gender to love the baby I already feel squirming in my womb. I will read the same stories, sing the same songs, lead the baby into the world in the same way.

5) The sonogram can be wrong, after all. And who wants to feel disappointment when the baby born is not the baby expected? I'll keep all the expectation and bound it in that one beautiful moment when the baby first cries and announces his/herself to our family.