Gender Revelations

Well.  That was enlightening.

So as of last Friday, my Trophy Wife™ and I went to the medical center where they performed a Sonogram (the artist formerly known as Ultrasound) on her to tell us what COUCH’s gender was.  This whole procedure put me in a somewhat maudlin mindset, and I totally blame Wal-Mart for it.  Because I can.  Observe:

See, neither my Trophy Wife™ nor I really wanted to know the baby’s gender ahead of time.  We were perfectly fine with it being a surprise that would suddenly become known to us in the delivery room, kinda like the time that he or she will first find the permanent markers and note that the walls in our kitchen are embarrassingly and boringly white.  We were both going to be happy with whatever came out of the womb, provided it wasn’t, say, man-eating and coated with sulfuric acid.  But as we walked through various department stores, we began to note with regret that gender-neutral clothes apparently went out with laserdisc players and betamax.  Even the greens and yellows (the predominately gender-neutral colors) had Transformers, dump trucks and dinosaurs-- or Cupcakes, big-eyelashed rabbits and words like Princess on them. 

So we held out our hope on Wal-Mart, the hub of Western Civilization, and the Communal Family Meeting Place (in Aisle Six, Preferably While Everyone Else Waits With Their Carts For You To Get The Fuck Finished Talking and Move Out of the Way.)  the one place we could be relatively sure that every family member who might have conceivably wanted to buy COUCH a Welcome to the World gift of some sort would probably go.

And sadly, Wal-Mart totally failed us.  Sure, they had more non-blue/non-pink outfits, but any of the printed shirts and onesies were still obviously pointed to one gender or the other, with slogans like “Future Football Star”, or “Princess in Training” or “Mommy’s Big Boy” or “When I Grow Up, I’m Going To Use My Vagina To Corrupt Your Son”.  So we were stuck.  Sure, we could have still held out and not found out what COUCH’s gender was, and A) waited to buy everything we needed until we knew whether we should buy it in blue or pink and went further in debt all at once than we will already do just having a child, or B) trained a prospective boy or girl to think that the “Daddy’s Little Princess”/”Mommy’s Tough Boy” pajamas they wore for their first year is not something they’ll need therapy for somewhere down the line.

Instead, we decided to go ahead with the gender reveal, and although I decided that I did want it, there was such a sense of finality to it.  If it was a girl, what would happen to all my dreams of a star running back/shooting guard or having someone to carry on the family name?  If it was a boy, wouldn’t I miss the idea of having a “Daddy’s Girl” or feeling my chest swell with pride when she went to prom or walked down the aisle?  If it was a girl, then Cade, Zane, or Micah were blown out of the water as names, and if it was a boy, Coda and Fable were gone.  And either way, COUCH was gone…you really can’t list a fetus as a Cluster of Unidentified Cells when they’ve been sort of Identified.  And COICH actually sounds vaguely like some kind of sexual euphemism, so we couldn’t even change the acronym.  There was just a small sense of comfort and familiarity with not knowing that would be going away.

That didn’t change our mind about it, however; it just gave us a lingering bit of sentimentality, like something that was lost and gone forever.  Sort of like my last shreds of dignity and innocence will be the first time COUCH drops an f-bomb or tells me to shut up and quit my old-man rambling.  So that was on the forefront of my mind as we went through with it. 

As a side note, It probably wasn’t so much on my Trophy Wife’s™ mind, but I feel that this was solely because what was on the forefront of her mind was something to the effect of “SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, GET THIS F^#@&ING PROCEDURE OVER WITH SO I CAN F&%$^ING PEE.”  Apparently, before your Sonogram you are required to drink an amount of water that is roughly equivalent to Lake Michigan.  My pet theory is that this whole process is simply to crowd the fetus up against the uteran wall for a clear picture, a bit like the old college prank with stuffing as many people as one could into a phone booth… back when phone booths actually existed and doing something like that was actually fun and not just a prelude to a sexual harassment suit.

So we watched the monitor screen with bated breath, looking for the telltale sign of a definitive penis/no penis picture.  COUCH was tremendously non-cooperative at first, which I can say is most likely par for the course with any child My Trophy Wife™ and I would procreate.  But as we watched the blobs and smears form into a picture (this time around, there was actually a slight bit of being able to tell what was what… I would like to point out that I correctly identified the spine, the heart, a femur and two gaseous anomalies that may have in fact been either organs or COUCH’s liquid lunch), we saw that there were a definite lack of “boy parts” as the nurse delicately put it. 

Although, if you look closely, there is a definite preponderance of “Predator parts."
That's awesome, as long as she stays the hell away from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover.

So we’re having a daughter.  COUCH is officially (as officially as they get, because in our society, the Sonogram techs are never allowed to say with certainty whether the blob in question is a boy or girl, because they can then have their ass sued by overly litigious parents who claim mental trauma over finding out that their girl has boy parts) a girl.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t bother me at all.  She can still like sports, if she so chooses, and still be a Daddy’s girl, and still be any damned thing she wants to be— artist, writer, astronaut, president, athlete—all of which I know is a lot to ask a 4 month old fetus, but I’m already a proud parent, dammit, so you can cut me a little slack.

In fact, as I told my Trophy Wife™, the only thing this gender reveal changes is the fact that now I’m on a schedule.  I have only fifteen or so years to actually go out and buy a handgun to scare the living shit out of any prospective boyfriends…

Because—and I’m sure you mothers and fathers can relate—there’s not a boy (or girl for that matter) in the entire damned world that’s going to be good enough for my daughter.

End of story.