traitorous instincts

We are in that minority of parents-to-be these days who are choosing not to discover the sex of our baby. We want to be surprised. And I wish I could be. But I know anyway. It's a boy. Just an instinct. Not that I'd be disappointed if it were a girl. And thinking it's a boy has given me these months of getting used to the idea that (good-god!) I might have to raise a boy, and so I feel it's prepared me for either array of genitals.

I’m not really sure why I think it's a boy. I did have that dream the day I found out I was pregnant that pointed out a very specific boy name I should take up. But since then I really haven't had any boy dreams, or baby dreams much at all, to tell the truth, besides a recent one and in that one, it was a girl. But it's a boy.

I tire of typing the "s/he" nonsense, when I just want to say "he". I have to qualify my answer when people ask (every day, 30x a day), "Do you know what you're having?" (Apart from the subject at hand, that is a rather strange question, wouldn't you say? "Do you know what you're having?" A baby. I think it'll be a baby. I'd be more comfortable if it came out a kitten, but they tell me it's not possible. I'm having a baby, you dolt.)

Friends and strangers tell you all kinds of things that are supposed to be fool-proof methods of determining the sex. With girls you're sicker, with boys you gain less weight and carry it in a compact ball, blahblahblah… No one seems to care that with any of these guesses, the odds are a healthy fifty-fifty. It ain't the race track, people. But I'm still going with mother's instinct: boy.

So, if my instincts are right I'll get to be regularly peed on by a tiny little man. Figuratively speaking, not that different an experience from what I've encountered all my life. A microcosm of society right here in my own home.

Of course, I don't rule out the possibility that I'm wrong. The last time I trusted my "instinct" it went something like "I guess it's possible I'm pregnant, but my instinct tells me it's just stress."