Snips and snails, sugar and spice

Yesterday I was offered a seat on the underground for the first time. Bruce often wondered aloud who would be the first person to spot my condition without having been told, and now we know. Her blue eyes bulged with concern and she scolded: “You should’ve said something!” I’m not quite sure what I would say though, in this case. I’ve got a loaded womb – give me the seat or I’ll puke in your lap! There’s no easy way to ask.

Our second, mid-pregnancy scan was much gentler overall than our first. The ultrasound technician was Jeremy – a kindly, broad-featured South African in his late forties, with tousselled hair and fine, wire-frame specs; he looked like he must spend his free days chopping wood for the fireplace, playing Handel in the kitchen while making soup and then applying paint to model trains with a tiny brush in a dimly lit basement.

He squinted amicably at the information on his screen, turning the wet wand this way and that to get a better look at all the parts. “Do you want to know the sex, if I can spot it,” he asked before he began, and we said yes. After what felt like several agonising minutes where I couldn’t read Bruce’s expression and had given up on Jeremy’s altogether, he said that everything looked normal. He showed us the arms, the hands and fingers, the long narrow bones of the legs ending in feet, and the details of the face and spine. And then he asked again if we wanted to know what it was.

Do you?

Probing for a good look at the genitalia, Jeremy laughed kindly and said, “Well, it’s not 100% accurate, but in my opinion, it looks like you’re going to have a little boy.” He said this with a warm, low smile in his voice. And he twisted the wand until the tiny little scrotum came into focus.

And then I basically ruined the moment by looking woundedly at my very excited husband and asking him if he’d have been as happy with a girl. Because I am an over-analytical, emotionally-retarded idiot at times (always then), and for a second believed that what I was seeing wasn’t rejoicing at the news of a healthy baby but relief that it wasn’t the girl every person in our family save for my sister had predicted.

Even if there had been some relief mixed in with his reaction though, it’s completely understandable, as Bruce has spent his entire life in the exclusive company of girls and women. It’s about time we upped the testosterone levels around here, and even though I don’t know a thing about little boys or how their brains and bodies work, I still have a hard time not crying when I think of how lovely our lives are going to be from this point onwards.

My own reactions to news always come much, much later, when things begin to sink in finally, like they’re doing now.

Ocean time

There are, there really are, worse things in life than being at work on the Thames during a rain storm on 1.5 hours of sleep. Remind me to tell you about those things sometime; at the moment I’m preoccupied with keeping my eye trained on the inching clock and desperately trying not to do what I did earlier on the underground (a feeling of passing-out-meets-vomiting-meets-coronary-meets me slumped over for a short while).

This afternoon we’re going for our second and final ultrasound before being left to our own imperfect divination with regards to the health of this growing potential. It’s right here, beneath my fingers at times, and yet it all seems to be happening on some distant planet, news reaching us by way of sonar reverberations light years away, as yet indecipherable.

So we’ll know how many appendages and if a brain or heart or how shapely a spine, and if conversation could progress beyond these essentials, these very essential essentials, then possibly a sex. Inquiring minds would like to know just which imaginary who we could be dealing with.

In any case, I’ve had no sleep and don’t think I could manage bad news. Wish me a baby.