I can't believe that I'm almost at the six-month point. I never thought I'd get here. I've had six months to get used to the idea, but I'm still sometimes astonished when I look down and see my belly. Then I think "where are my feet? I thought I had feet?"
The lovely M-B asked if I knew the sex. The answer is no. My doctor(s) know the sex, but I have asked them not to tell me. Why? I can think of a few different answers, but I really don't know which one is the true motivation. It seems to change from day to day. Really the bottom line is that waiting to find out feels right for me and Mystery. If it stops feeling right, then we'll call the doctor and find out.
Reasons, in no particular order:
-To keep from getting flooded with pink or blue gifts (yes, I do realize that this means that we'll get green and yellow instead...)
-To keep from projecting a personality onto Eggbert before we even meet. Let's face it, some girls hate pink, and some boys love dolls, but it can be very difficult not to project one's own expectations about sex/gender-appropriate behavior onto a child. De-emphasizing the sex in our own minds at this point is one way for us to practice being open-minded about the little person that we hope to welcome in November.
-To avoid disappointment, part I. I don't think that either of us has a strong preference, but that may just be denial speaking. I can't imagine feeling anything but joy on the actual birth day, whereas finding out now, before we have an actual baby to hold, opens us up to the possibility of disappointment.
-To avoid disappointment, part II. Right now, I am very much enjoying both boy fantasies and girl fantasies. Since I don't know Eggbert's sex, the world is my oyster. I can dream about whatever I want. I think that finding out now would expose me to a sense of loss, since it would render half of my fantasies infeasible. At least on the birthday, I'll have a baby to console me.
-To do at least one thing the "old-fashioned" way. Given the years of infertility, the multiple interventions, the high-tech conception, and the intensive monitoring associated with this pregnancy, I'm enjoying the fact that there is still a little mystery left in the process.
I totally get why other people want to find out. I always thought I'd want to find out too. I can see a huge number of arguments for finding out. In the end, though, it doesn't make any difference to the baby, so there's not any "right" or "wrong" thing to do. For us, this decision feels good, and in the end, this decision IS all about what we want. So why did you decide to find out or not?
7 comments:
i think not finding out is really cool. i was drawn to the idea of doing something the old fashioned way and to the element of surprise. i also have a friend who was very disappointed when she found out even though she didn't expect to be and didn't realize she had preconceieved notions.
in the end i choose to find out because i hoped it would finally help make the pregnancy feel real (it did, but not as much as i thought it might). it's still very hard to imagine that we will have a daughter, but now and then the idea gets to me in a way that having an "it" didn't.
well, we asked because it made the baby more real. It was something like "if they tell us the sex, the baby is alive and well, right?". I know it is silly beyond words but I have asked several times if it was "still a boy" and I am not sure why I needed constant reinsurance. We are not obsessed with the gender. We went through a lot and would have been happy no matter what. I guess I was still afraid they had somehow screwed up the CVS test and given us the results of another baby. We were able to pick a name really early in the pregnancy. And more importantly, we stopped calling the baby "Principessa/Juliette" but "Tiburce L"Esquimau/ Max". :-)
A whole lot of the decisions on our path to parenthood were and are being made by me. I let my husband decide on this one, and he wants to know.
The baby isn't cooperating to well, but that's another story. :-)
100% curiosity... I HAD to know :) I toyed briefly with the idea of not finding out, but after a few of our u/s appointments, there was no way we would have NOT known... it was just that obvious ours was a boy.
I chose not to know because I thought it was much more exciting that way... I think that when your baby is born and it's healthy then there isn't even a second of disappointment. I think finding out earlier could be disappointing if you had a preference.
Good choice to not find out. We found out and then spent the rest of the pregnancy getting paranoid about the technician getting it wrong. We still bought so much pink like Pepto threw up at our house.
I just blogged about this too.
We are not finding out because it feels RIGHT. I agree with every point you made!
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