A complicated pregnancy with one simple surprise
Editor Note: CityMom Hannah has recently welcomed her second son (congrats!) but shared these insights with us ahead of his birth on why they chose not to learn the sex beforehand. Read on to see how this decision impacted her pregnancy in a world where Insta-worthy gender reveals have become the norm.
When my husband and I had our first child, we knew that we wanted to know the sex before he was born. Like most couples, we found out at the 20-week scan that we were having a boy, and we were thrilled. When my husband and I found out I was pregnant again, we knew the opposite: We wanted the sex to be a surprise. What we didn’t know then was how that one choice would become a kind of light throughout what would become a very complicated pregnancy.
From the very start, this pregnancy has been fraught with complications. An ER visit at five weeks put aside fears of an ectopic pregnancy. A second ER visit at 11 weeks for bleeding eased fears of miscarriage, though it did earn me an early Rhogam shot. The 20-week growth scan showed us a 99th-percentile-sized baby, and a follow-up scan four weeks later revealed too much amniotic fluid – awarding us a team of specialists in maternal-fetal medicine and weekly ultrasounds to check for fetal distress.
So far, we have had 13 ultrasounds. Every time, we declined to find out the sex, and my husband and I would look away from the screen and at each other.
It’s been eye-opening to see all of the different reactions to us not knowing the sex of our baby. Some people find it very exciting, while a lot of friends and a few family members can’t believe it.
“Don’t you want to know?” they’d ask. “I couldn’t stand not knowing.”
“You must KNOW, though,” others would say as if I have some inner sense of what it must be.
Or, my personal favorite, “But how do you plan if you don’t know?”
First of all, of course, we want to know – and we will when he or she is born. It’s not as if we’re never going to find out. Second, I truly have no idea whether they’re a boy or girl, though I do know they love chicken fajitas.
As far as planning, I don’t understand what would change in our plans. They all wear onesies or swaddles for the first weeks of life – what is there to plan? I don’t think the baby will care if its onesie is blue instead of pink. The nursery is green, and I don’t think that will bother them either.
With our first child, Jack, I worried a lot about connecting with him. I thought knowing the sex would help me to envision this child I was having, and in a way it did. But when they handed him to me, I also became aware of just how little any of that mattered.
This was our baby – the rest was details.
Read more from Hannah - Why I "opted “in” to a planned c-section
I think there are also issues in imagining a life for your child before they’re even born, in putting all of those expectations on them before they even take their first breath. Even now, I try hard to keep expectations off of Jack so that he can grow to become who he’s meant to be without feeling the need to live up to someone’s opinions. I’ll fight that same fight with our second baby.
With all of the complications of this pregnancy, that weight of expectations has become even more apparent. Most people go into pregnancy assuming they’ll have a healthy baby. For us, that’s been tested at just about every step. Despite weekly scans and testing, we really can’t know what our baby will be like until they are born – nobody can.
In the midst of all of that, not knowing the sex has been something purely fun to debate, because either way, we win. Either way, we’ll love this child and support whoever they become.
We are so excited to meet this baby. A girl hasn’t been born in my husband’s family for nearly 200 years, and so having a girl would be “breaking the curse,” as we like to joke. As a mom of one boy, I’d love to have another.
