TOMORROW IS OUR ULTRASOUND!
This is exciting for two reasons:
Reason #1: At almost 20 weeks, long after my iPhone’s baby app said I would likely be feeling my baby moving around inside of me, I have STILL not felt anything definitive. Nothing at all (besides round ligament pains, i.e. really painful cramps in my lower abdomen) that feels in any way different than my stomach feels normally. The obvious conclusion, then, that an overthinking, overstressing, overworrying lunatic like myself would come to is that my baby is dead.
Yes. Dead. My baby is dead inside of me and has been dead for the last 4 weeks, ever since the last day we heard its heartbeat.
Obviously the chances of this are unlikely, but there it is. In my mind, the absence of movement is clearly death.
[Tangent: Although I do look forward to feeling the baby move inside me insofar as it indicates the baby’s live-ness, there is a HUGE part of me that dreads it because quite frankly it grosses me out. There. I said it. IT GROSSES ME OUT. The idea of a living organism, A LIVING HUMAN inside of my very own self unsettles me to literally no end. If there were any other way to bring a child into this world besides having it grow inside me, I would do it. If you think that makes me an unfit mother, go ahead and keep judging me. I hate you right back.]
[Oversensitive much? Yes. Yes I am.]
Still, for all my queasiness at the thought of a growing organism in my self, a growing one is still better than a dead one. You might think me cruel, talking about dead babies so casually, but trust me: it’s a defense mechanism. I’ve had terrible nightmares lately that my baby is sitting there dead in my womb, and it’s been just awful.
Reason #2: I am almost at week 20 of this pregnancy. For those of you who don’t know, that means I’m almost halfway through and this will be my first ultrasound of the pregnancy. In Canada, where healthcare is socialized (i.e. free but we pay higher taxes for it), they make pregnant women wait until around week 20 to have their first ultrasound (as long as everything else checks out okay with the baby up to that point).
That means pregnant women in America, the land of the free (but expensive healthcare), who are due well after me have known for weeks now whether their baby is a girl or boy.
I feel gypped. Needless to say.
And in case you were wondering, it was never even a consideration whether or not to find out the baby’s sex. We are.
(Tangent: One time in college I took a class on Sexuality. Seriously. That’s what it was called. Sexuality 101. Can you imagine? Me? The prudeness? In a class? On SEXUALITY? It was the most awkward semester of my life.
During one particular unit, Sexuality and Culture, we learned that “sex” is a biological term and “gender” is a cultural term. That is, the SEX (biological term, i.e. female/male) of a person is determined by chromosomes, while the GENDER (cultural term, i.e. feminine/masculine) is determined by society. In other words, I might be biologically female but I could identify socially with masculinity.
The whole point of this being that technically speaking, ultrasounds do not reveal the GENDER of the baby—for how could a photo reveal whether the baby will identify as feminine or masculine—but instead the SEX of the baby.
Therefore, as one of the few snobberisms I allow myself in life, I have come to view it as very much a pet peeve when people say “Are you going to find out the gender of the baby?” instead of “the sex of the baby,” which happens quite regularly because what normal person WOULD say that awkward word “sex” when, in most people’s minds, the less embarrassing word is clearly “gender?”
I always want to reply, “The world may never know the gender of this child, but the sex we would definitely like to know.”)
One girl I work with said she chose not to find out the sex of her babies in advance. She said it was because there are so few surprises in life that she wanted to enjoy what ones she had.
At first I thought her reasoning sound, but then I realised it bore two fundamental flaws:
Firstly, that the sex of the baby can be only one of three things: male, female, or transsexual. It’s not like I’m randomly going to give birth to a sea turtle or some bizarre creature the world has never known. So how surprised can I really be? Male, female, or a little of each. SURPRISE!
And secondly, that what little element of surprise *might* exist in a revelation with only three potential outcomes can still exist at 20 weeks just as profoundly as it might at 40 (or 38 because we’re thinking happy thoughts here). Just because I intend to find out five months before the baby is born doesn’t mean it will be any less thrilling than if I’d waited until the very moment it shoots out of my wide open crotch.
On top of all this, I have baby crap to buy. And while I certainly don’t intend to dress a daughter all in pink or a son in solely blue, I nevertheless plan on buying some gender-specific items for the child. Think headbands for a girl or teeny baby jock straps for a boy. One can never be too safe.
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