Saving the surprise: my corner of the gender divide

Finding out the sex of your baby well before they are born has become a pretty standard pit stop on the modern pregnancy road trip.

Somewhere around the twenty week mark, pregnant women now pull off the proverbial pregnancy highway to visit the ultrasound technician for a pink/blue diagnosis and some nursery colour scheme directions.

This new pregnancy milestone has given a quick and drug-free birth to the 'gender reveal market': pink and blue cream-filled cupcakes, cutesie black and white photographs featuring ribbons and bow ties, and pinatas laden with tell-tale toys and treats.

Gender reveal parties are all the rage; they seem to have almost over taken the tired old baby shower in the must-do-must-have stakes, and now come replete with a mother (to be) load of baked goods, paper decorations and appropriately coloured sparkles.

Call me a cynic, call me a party pooper, call me old-fashioned, but both the concept of finding out the sex of your baby ahead of time, and the market that has grown with the technological capability to do so, goes over my head. Something just doesn't sit right with me about peeking inside my unborn baby's house without invitation and revealing one of life's coolest mysteries before it's fully cooked.

My brain lumps the concept in the same nonsensical category as finding out the winner of the relay race before all the batons have been exchanged, or watching the final season of How I Met Your Mother before starting on the rest of the series.

My lack of agreement is not an indictment on those who have found out their future ahead of time or skipped merrily down the 'gender reveal' path. Each to their own, I say, and while I reserve the option to critique your decision, I will also do the Macarena in an inflatable swimming pool of glittery pink and blue balloons to defend your right to make it.

But as a reciprocal gesture to my embarrassing Macarena performance, I sincerely hope you will accept my decision not to find out the sex of my baby and stand up for my right to keep the surprise alive - with all the gender-neutral lime and lemon baby clothing glory it comes wrapped in.

Because my decision to save the surprise is just as valid, and just as logical, and just as practical as your decision to find out the sex of your baby at the earliest possible scan and reveal it to the world through a clever Facebook status.

My decision to stick it out in suspense for ten months was built upon a solid foundation of personal beliefs and experiences, and was constructed with a unique quilt of handmade individual thoughts and factors.

One of the standout pieces of my decision pie was my unexpectedly awesome relationship with my bump. I didn't like many things about the pregnancy experience, but I loved my bump. It stuck right out the front like a watermelon and also right round the sides like an exploding cheese-ball. It was warm and taut and bouncy and came with me wherever I went like a cool pet rock.

My husband and I named my wriggling, kicking bump Bob - minus seven points for originality there - and included it in our daily conversations: did you like the thai chilli basil dish Bob, how was that crowded tram ride this afternoon Bob, who do you think you'll turn out to be Bob?

Bob was the heart of our pregnancy journey. When our beautiful daughter was born, she became the heart of our universe, and Bob hopped into the happy memory bank. Bob was the possibility, and my daughter is the brilliant actuality, and I love that we got to know them both in their own time. 

It wasn't just the bump though. I also wanted to hold off finding out my baby's sex before the big day because I really wanted to meet my son/daughter for the first time without the baggage of preconceived notions and expectations.

I didn't want to create a mental picture of a little boy or little girl who would never exist outside my subconscious wandering and lazy daydreams - I wanted to meet my child as a complete little person, and it felt like I couldn't do that if I already knew one of their biggest secrets ahead of time.

Another big serving of my decision pie was cut from my dislike of the infamous pink/blue dichotomy. I had absolutely no desire to find out the sex of my baby and dip my toe into the gender-appropriate-colour war, or try and navigate a compromised pastel path through the Great Pink and Blue Dividing Range.

Giving credence to traditional sex and gender stereotypes has never been my thing (I have an Arts degree, it goes with the territory) and I've never been fond of following basic rules - there's just something about accepted norms that makes me want to twist knobs and push buttons and mix up all the puzzle pieces to create a headache.

Not finding out the sex of the baby proved as effective as abstinence previously did in keeping the pink and blue stuff out of the nursery, out of the gift bags and out of the firing line of my wordy ideological rants (until today).

Of course, the house is now full to overflowing with pink and purple plastic stuff and frilly floral dresses with matching socks and headbands - but at least I know I held off the invasion for as long as possible. 

The real stickler for me in the great gender reveal debate, though, it that it's just not cricket - just because we humans can find out the sex of our unborn babies halfway through gestation doesn't necessarily mean we need to or we should.

Technology has given our society amazing capabilities that generations past never even dreamed would be possible, and those capabilities are truly exceptional. We can microwave our cups of tea when they go cold, we can post blogs for global audiences from our couches, we can design and produce motor vehicles and space shuttles ,and we can save sick children and eradicate horrific diseases. We can do a myriad of brilliant things with technology - but we don't have to do them all, and we don't have to do them every day.

We can pick and choose how we engage with technology to suit our personal wants and needs and desires. I choose not to have a television in my bedroom so I don't stay awake all night watching trash, I choose not to have notifications on my smart phone so I don't get fired up every time someone sends an angry tweet about one of my posts, and I choose not to use an electric mixer when I bake because I find something deeply satisfying about creaming a cake batter from scratch with a wooden spoon.

The same goes for finding out the sex of my babies. I could easily have found out my daughter was my daughter before she was born and I could easily find out what sex my future children are before they push their way out into mortal existence, but I choose not to - because I don't need to, and I don't want to, and I don't have to.

Did you save the surprise or embrace the great gender reveal?

M x 

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photo credit: JFXie via photopin cc

20 weeks: an open letter to my pregnant friend

Cake is not the enemy

Hurrah! You did it! You are twenty weeks pregnant! 

Congratulations on reaching this important milestone on your first ride on the pregnancy roller coaster. You have just ricocheted out of the loopy and bendy bits of the ride and embarked upon the long, steep climb before the sheer vertical drop. 

Having suffered through the early stages of pregnancy, you are now qualified to experience the joys of the midway juncture: finding out whether your watermelon is a blue or a pink one, fighting with the elderly to get the priority seat on the packed morning commuter train, agonising over what nursery accessories to order on eBay.

You are also about to unceremoniously pop, much like a piece of microwave popcorn. You might also start to swell, puff, huff, stretch, sweat and take on a new skin tone - think reds, pinks and splotches - and be forced to stop shaving your legs and clipping your toenails. Choice. 

As your belly continues to increase, so too will the level of unsolicited pregnancy advice you receive. From your friends, from your mother, from your colleagues, and from complete strangers (and yes, you will want to strangle them, and yes, that is normal). 
 
A pastiche of meddlers will tell you to wear compression stockings, avoid bean sprouts, take a babymoon, give up on fashion and buy mumu dresses, and cut out dried fruit before your gestational diabetes test. Nod, shrug, tell them to shut up and sod off, stick the proverbial where the sun don't shine, then waddle off on your own and eat some cake. 

Before the unsolicited onslaught begins, I would like to offer five little snippets of advice of my own, then step aside and encourage you to choose your own adventure (although I fear you may already know how the ending will play out!)

Regardless of whether you choose to be the captain of a tight ship with an even tighter birth plan, or a pirate with a platoon of chocolate biscuits and a tattered treasure map, I will support both your method and your madness. 

Cake
Considering it's already on the table, let's start with cake. During the second half of your pregnancy there will be lots of cake.  Or biscuits, or sour cream, or hot dogs, or blocks of cheese, or hamburgers, or sour gummy worms, or bagels, or a whole family sized bag of random cravings. 

When you are staring down the barrel of yet another block of dark chocolate with sea salt, and you feel conflicted (hello little voices) please don't be too hard on yourself. Much like shells gain crabs and cream carpets gain red wine, pregnant women gain weight. 

Try as you might, you will not stay thin, you will not be happy with how you look, and you will never be content with the amount of weight you did (or perhaps, unusually, did not) put on during your ten month stint as a pregnant lady. So provided you keep a modicum of perspective and self-control, give in to some of the cravings and eat yourself to a little bit of happiness. 
 
Undies
To accommodate the growing baby, and the growing consumption of cake, your body will be forced to expand. Sometimes this expansion will be proportional, and sometimes it will preference particular sections of your anatomy. Regardless of expansion type, you will expand around the middle, leaving your beloved reg grundies rather too tight for comfort.

To avoid standing in the checkout queue at the supermarket with a pair of cheap cotton undies wedged between your bum cheeks, or spending most of your work day mentally trying to stop your underwear sliding down your leg, please go out this weekend and invest in a new and larger set of underwear. 

Tantrums
Pregnant tantrums happen. They are much like regular tantrums, but with added fuel and excess sugar. Despite being a professional woman with thirty-odd years of life experience and lessons safely in the makeup bag, the odds are high that you will succumb to the pregnant tantrum.

Your tantrum could be about anything, and it could strike at any moment. The only thing for certain is that your tantrum will be entirely irrational and illogical, but only in hindsight. The tantrum will rattle your partner - and possibly the neighbours, sorry about that - before suddenly dissipating into the atmosphere and leaving you demanding more cake. 

Accept it. Eat some cake. Eat the rest of the cake. Move on. 

Sex
So this is the state of play - you are twenty weeks pregnant, you have a reasonable bump on your front which makes things a bit weird in the bedroom, and you are so shattered from making a cup of tea and doing the laundry that you would like to curl up with your pregnancy pillow and just watch reruns of Dawsons Creek until the baby shows up. 

Sure, sounds reasonable enough, but I assure you - now is the time to have sex.  You have not yet endured labour, you have not yet acquired a sleepless baby and you have not (quite) become Violet Beauregarde and been rolled to the juicing room. There is an acutely limited window of opportunity right in front of you, which will slam shut and not be pried open again for quite some time. 

You have been warned.

Solitude
Over the coming weeks, which will pass in a blur yet take an entire lifetime all at once, you will move from being a bit pregnant to being totally, painfully, awkwardly, unmistakeably, completely, pregnant. 

When you finish work on a Friday night, you will want to go home and hibernate instead of going to the pub. You will laugh at those people who invite you out to dinner at 9pm, and curse at the (same) people who invite you out to dinner at restaurants that have stairs or serve seafood or have noisy concrete walls.

You will start to derive a strange joy from washing and folding bassinet linen and stockpiling impossibly tiny socks. No doubt, you will be ropeable when your husband goes to the cricket for the weekend and leaves you on the couch with a promising kick boxer in your stomach, ice packs on your swollen feet and an unopened flat pack cot. 

You will mostly enjoy flumping in solitude, and napping before dinner, and wearing nothing but pajamas from Friday night until Monday morning. Sometimes though, you will get lonely, and feel like the pregnant lady that time and your friends forgot. When this happens, just pick up the phone and call me. Any time of day, any time of night - I'm always here, and I'll probably be awake breastfeeding anyway.

M x 

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