Toads in the Hole

Pink vs. Blue

People often ask expectant parents about the gender of their fetus. “So, do you know?” is often all they need to say, because the gender is so clearly the question of the hour that no elaboration is necessary, and a ruthless efficiency in getting to the point best serves all involved. I eagerly await the day when someone will indicate Aimee’s abdomen with their thumb and say, “Eh?”

After we say that we don’t know, our interlocutors hasten to ask, “But will you find out?” We always say that indeed we will, and we try to say it in a reassuring way. “In just a couple months, everyone will know, including you. You’ll know because we’ll tell you. We’ll tell you as soon as we know and we happen to see you. We would never keep you in the dark. Gender-wise, you’ll know as much as anyone very soon.”

There have been a few people who have urged us not to find out. They’ve never really explained their perspective, other than that the gender should be “a surprise.” In some ways, I think this is weird. Either EthelRed is a girl, or EthelRed is a boy. It’s like saying that flipping a coin and having it come out heads is a surprise. If there were more options, more varieties of gender, that might be something. “Congratulations! It’s a human that reproduces via budding!” or “Congratulations! It’s one of those aliens from Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness that cycle from male to female!” But no, it’s going to be “Congratulations! It’s a [girl or boy]!” and I’m unlikely to think, “Man, didn’t see that coming!”

But I suppose I can see their point. So many aspects of pregnancy cloak themselves in mystery, beginning with the fact that we can potter through our lives upwards of three months (two in our case) without cottoning on to the fact of our gravida. Even after the truth has come out, there’s an uncertain unreality about the state of things, especially for the lucky women like Aimee who are free of morning sickness. And then there’s the most mysterious thing of all, the fetus itself. In Misconceptions Naomi Wolf describes her 20-week sonogram thusly:

Now it was reclining on its back- practically resting on its elbows, knees bent, in profile, like the reclining gods in Mexico. Its face was in profile, too, a perfect, eerie conventional snub-nosed baby profile.

Then slowly, as if it were looking straight at me- as if to warn me not to ever take its seeming familiarity for granted- it turned its face fully forward. The sweet baby profile dissolved and reconfigured itself. The down all over my skin rose in chills: the eyes were not human eyes, but the overscale almond eyeshields of space invaders in cartoons from the 1950s, the vast, sightless eyes that contemporary “alien” abductees report: eyes that fix and nearly drown you in their flat depths…. “Do all five-month fetuses look like ET?” I asked the technician in a voice that tried for levity. She laughed. “Oh, sure. I should have told you ahead of time. They all look like that. We get so used to it, we forget to mention it, but parents are often spooked when they see the face for the first time.

I can understand someone feeling an unwillingness to shine too bright a light at the magical state of the fetus, wanting to respect and preserve its Otherness. We try to plan so many things in life, it’s a nice idea just to let a baby happen and turn out however it will.

Posted by Joel at October 2, 2005 07:49 PM