Yes, I Did
My husband was adamant: "I want it to be a surprise," he kept saying. "After the baby's born, I want to call my parents and say, 'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' and have it be real news."
"But it'll be a surprise no matter when we find out," I'd shoot back. "It'll be real news whenever you make that call."
It's a perfectly logical argument, but Haywood wanted no part of it. When you're dealing with primeval feelings and ancient traditions, he said, logic is beside the point.
But my own feelings, though certainly less tied to ancient tradition, were equally primeval: This baby was growing in my body. This baby was transforming my heart. This baby was going to be one of the great loves of my life, and I wanted to learn as much about him or her as soon as I could learn it.
It wasn't about planning the nursery or buying baby clothes. I just wanted to know -- in the same way I wanted to know whether my child would have a lot of hair like Haywood's dad or my Dumbo-like ears, if he or she would be even-tempered and calm or passionate and volatile. An ultrasound couldn't tell me such things. But it could tell me whether my baby was a boy or a girl.
Who cared if it was a break with ancient tradition to get a peek between the legs a few months early? It's not like we were doing anything else in any sort of ancient way. We would be having our baby in the hospital, with high-tech monitoring devices and all the pain medication I'd need to get through labor.
"You can find out and just not tell me," Haywood suggested. But I wanted us to enter parenthood in unison, so when he announced to the sonographer that we didn't want to know the baby's sex, I didn't peep -- even when the sonographer asked, "Are you sure? I've got a great view here." I nodded and squeezed Haywood's hand.
I was squeezing his hand again four months later when the doctor exclaimed, "It's a boy! What's his name?" Haywood choked out, "It's Sam," hugged me, and cried.
Four years later, expecting again, we took the same positions, but things were different. I'd had two miscarriages since Sam was born and was on bed rest with preterm labor, praying my baby would make it. So, early on I'd made up my mind: I'd find out the gender and not tell Haywood. This time there was an added urgency: If I wasn't going to have the chance to see this baby grow up, at least I could think in terms of him or her.
At my 20-week ultrasound, Haywood held up Sam so that he could see the shadowy baby waving and kicking. When the sonographer asked, "Do you want to know the sex?" I shook my head. "No thanks," I said. "We want it to be a surprise." Then Haywood left to let Sam run off some energy in the hallway and I asked, "Is it a boy or a girl?" The sonographer looked startled. "Are you sure you want to know?"
"Yes. Anything you know, I want to know."
It turns out that Haywood and I were both right. For him, the surprise was worth the wait. For me, when that sonographer said, "It's a boy!" the words sounded as magical as they had the first time I heard them: in a delivery room, four years before.
Contributing editor Margaret Renkl is the mother of three boys, ages 4, 6, and 11.
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