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Measurable Brain Activity I like my mysteries in book form, thanks. Three weeks from today I will know what kind of baby I'm having. And I can't wait. I know some people like to keep themselves in suspense until the birth, guessing what the baby's sex is, buying green, yellow and red clothes, having two names picked out. I am not one of those people. In fact I can't even identify with those people, I must know ASAP. And it's not like I am a particularly impatient person, it's just that I like to have as much information as possible before I act and the baby's sex is information that I have access to. Why the hell wouldn't I want that information? And it's not like I'm really hoping for one sex or the other, it really doesn't matter to me. I just want to know who I'm talking to, I don't want to keep typing his/her s/he when I'm talking about the baby. I want to address the little one by name as I chat with my belly (yeah, I do that. Wanna make something of it? I warn you I have very unrepentent hormones on my side) I don't want to be saying 'um, hi Jack or Kate, it's Mommy' . That just feels wrong to me. When I was pregnant with The Boy, I felt the same way. And it was a good thing I found out because the idea of having a boy took some getting used to. This is kind of hard to explain, so bear with me. It's not that I thought I was having a girl, or that I was particularly committed to having one but I was thrown off by the news that I was having a boy. I think I would have taken the news that I was having a girl in stride, I would have said 'cool' and moved on from there. But having a boy took some adjustment. There were three reasons for this: 1) I had very little experience in dealing with little boys and for some reason that seemed to matter. 2) It was weird to think that there was already a difference between me and the child that was living inside of me. He wasn't even external yet and he was already distant from me. I think the realization that the baby was a completely different person with his own distinct personality would have struck a little later if he had been a girl. Dumb, I know, but you trying growing someone inside and thinking of it as a separate entity at the same time - it bends the brain. 3) It was decidedly odd to discover that something that still felt like part of me was actually male. It was like discovering that my liver was a boy or that my left elbow had decided to switch to the other team. This was a much more basic issue that the separate personality issue above, I mean it would have struck me eventually that this child would be its own person no matter what sex the baby was. But feeling like part of your body was now a different sex? That is really disturbing. So needless to say, this all took me a while to process. That's kind of a lot to work through, really, freaking out because part of my body (not really, I know but work with me here) had changed sex and because the child I had been nurturing as if it was part of me was revealed to be vastly different. And yeah, I think men and women are vastly different. And sure, some of that comes from how they are brought up. And I don't think we can know how the other team lives, how they filter their new experiences through their old ones. Trying to wrap my mind around that distance was rather exhausting and required a lot of processing time. Then I realized the upside to that distance. If my child had been a girl, I would be able to identify with every pain in a different way that I will identify with my son's pain. The difference between sympathy and empathy. I began to realize that that might be useful to him and to me, that the distance might give me enough perspctive to be helpful or to offer a distraction. And I realized that my child has two parents and that he would be have his father to empathize with him, and that it might be nice for The Man to have a different sort of claim on our kid. I mean, I got to carry him, and feel him kick and make milk to feed him. It's pretty great that The Man gets to do guy stuff with him so he can be on the inside track and I can be excluded. I think it was much better to do all that processing months before The Boy made his (early!) appearance. It was hard enough to bond with him while I was seeing him only a few hours a day in the NICU and I was feeling lonlier that I've ever felt alone in my hospital room. I can't imagine if I had to do all that thinking at that point - I would have been a prime candidate for post-partum depression. And that brings us to this time. I want to know so I can satisfy my curiousity, so I can chat with the baby by name and so, if I have some processing to do (and I may be used to the idea of having a boy this time, who knows? Perhaps the thought of having a girl baby will throw me into a different loop. I'm a thinker, what can I say?), I can get it over with now rather than cluttering up my post-partum brain with worries of distance and unfamiliarity. So, come July 27, if the kid is co-operative, I will know whether I need to buy some pink sleepers to throw in with the colours I already have. You can wait until the bitter end for your mystery to be solved but 18.5 weeks of ambiguity is plenty for me. © Christine C. Hennebury 2004 |
