“It sounds like a girl!” my new midwife cooed at me the first time she listened to my baby’s heartbeat at 18 weeks. Of course, she realizes that she has no way of knowing the gender from the swishing sounds coming through the fetal Doppler monitor. But still, it’s fun to guess—right?
My husband and I decided long ago that we don’t want to find out the sex of our baby. We prefer the surprise of finding out on the baby’s birthday, sort of as added motivation for getting through the birth and also because life offers us so few truly wonderful surprises. It was an easy choice for us, but—like my decision to switch from an OB to a midwife—it’s been met with some interesting responses.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, people really want to think they have some sort of sixth sense for guessing the sex of an unborn baby. As soon as friends and family found out we were expecting and well before I was even close to showing, everyone we knew started taking guesses and making wagers with a kind of confidence that was almost unnerving.
“You’re feeling nauseous? It’s definitely a girl!”
“You seem to be snacking on pretzels a lot lately. You’re having a boy!”
My college friend did the time-honored string-and-ring test and held her breath as she watched the telltale ring swung in circle. That, combined with a fetal heartrate in the 140-150 range has her convinced I’m having a boy. By the time my belly starting popping and people could see I was carrying relatively low, two strangers also guessed that I was having a boy with a self-assurance I thought was reserved for the ultrasound technician. But the horizontal spread that my stomach is slowly assuming has my sister seriously thinking it’s a girl.
At this point, pretty much every old wives’ tale in the book has been presented to me as hard science. And my intuition—although I currently have none whatsoever—is entirely moot.
“We’ll just have to see!” is the refrain I keep repeating to every new guesser, and a handful of family and friends who continue to ply me with their cocksure judgements. But my slight hesitance to accept their prognosis as factually legitimate never seems to satisfy their need to be right. And who will be right? Only time will tell.
Of course, it really doesn’t matter whether this baby is a boy or a girl. And my husband and I are finding humor in how visibly frustrated our loved ones are that the sex is a big secret until the end of the summer when this baby is due to make his or her appearance.
While we don’t get the added bonus of having a festive gender reveal party or the convenience of being able to plan a pink or blue nursery, we’re still pretty happy with our decision. And we’re very much looking forward to the satisfaction of proving half of the guessers wrong in the not-too-distant future.
Whitney C. Harris is a freelance writer living in Westchester, NY. She is due at the end of August. Find her at whitneycharris.com.
