I think I should have tacked on the the following bit from my LJ post when I made posts elsewhere yesterday:
I do know hormones are on the rise about this though, because I swear I will gnaw off the arm of anyone who goes "well won't this just be a nice surprise for you in May!" all cheerfully because damn it, it was just as much a fun surprise had we learned it today.IT IS NOT A NICE SURPRISE, PERIOD. STOP PROJECTING YOUR OWN DESIRES FOR SECRECY ON ME BECAUSE I AM NOT YOU.
It's this whole idea that waiting until the birth is such a fun thing to do and while it might be for the next woman, for me? IT'S NOT AT ALL. I mean, childbirth isn't exactly an easy process, even if it is natural, there is a lot of long hours and likely exhaustion, all this need to focus to manage the pain and every good and bad thing on top of that, I REALLY don't want the gender of my baby to be one of the unknown things that comes out at this time. This goes beyond simple impatience to personal comfort, because not knowing makes me anxious. There is so much I can't know or plan for and so much risk still, even if everything is fine now, because people lose babies at all stages in pregnancy, one more unknown STRESSES ME OUT. I can't plan for this in any way other than a gender neutralnursery and two sets of freaking names. Settling on a name for a boy was hard, it took nearly two and some years since we've been talking names since we STARTED TTCing I hate gender neutral dictates to prospective gift givers because not everyone WILL LISTEN anyhow (which is one of my arguments against sharing the guess of the tech or even telling anyone that there WAS a guess so they don't press us to know) and we'll have stuff we can't use if the baby is one gender and not the other. And no, a boy cannot wear pink, Zane would stroke out on the floor from the affront to his idea of masculinity. This is the man who thinks yellow is a girl's color!
And what the fuck ever on u/s gender revelation being a recent development in medical situations and generations before not knowing the gender, telling me that sounds just as ridiculous as I know the following would sound to ANYONE "well, we've ran out of the polio vaccine and you can't get it, BUT there have been lots of people before you who didn't have it"!! Just because people before you didn't get it does not mean that becomes an adequate phrase of comfort when you are in a medical era that CAN get it but you DIDN'T get a chance to, so really, the next person to say that to me I'm going to smack.
Now that I've been suitably bitchy about this whole thing, I don't feel any better. I still want to know for sure (as sure as these can be, I'm no idiot, I know it's not a perfect science) because I want to prepare, not only the house and our lives, but ME, INSIDE. I really did have my heart set on a boy, even though I've had no feeling one way or another and this was supposed to be when I found out if I was getting that boy or if it was going to be a girl instead. Mentally, I'm not ready to be a girl mom. People can laugh all they want, but it's just something I've known as long as we've beenTTCing , and even for a long time before that, that I felt like I was meant to be a boy mom. I've thought about it enough that I could get past the panic of "OMG I WILL SUCK AS A PARENT" and on to all the issues that boys eventually have that parents have to face, to the point I was okay with it. Granted, I know that's rich coming from someone with no kids, but I'm ready to take on the challenges of being a boy mom, I really am.
I AM NOT READY AND NEVER WILL BE READY TO BE A GIRL MOM. It's more than just getting to go to the baby department and dress them like a doll, it's about teaching them how to survive all the things you had to go through as the same gender. BEING A GIRL SUCKS, I fully admit it. I honestly don't have a clue how I ended up as a somewhat well adjusted adult female as far as anything to do with myself, but I know it has to be because my Mom was a GOOD girl mom. As a teen I had HUGE self-esteem and body image issues and I went to school with some of the NASTIEST little bitches to walk the planet. For God's sake, even the boys in that crowd weren't great, I used to have awful drawings made of me by the resident talented artists (though not just me, there were other victims), because that was how those kids mocked the others, with their art, rather than teachers giving them something constructive to do with their time. The movie Mean Girls had nothing on my elementary/junior high school experience. Even though I can look back now and see all the kick ass stuff in highschool I did and know I was a genuinely likable person with friends (even if they weren't great friends all the time), I didn't see that THEN, when I was dateless and unhappy with who I was. Hell, had I not started dating Zane when I did, I would likely still be single and miserable because I was not the girl who EVER got a date, both of my prom dates were just boys I knew and, more than that, I was one of those girls who thoughtcoupledom was better than single life, so I can't even teach my daughter how to be an independent female! I AM NOT PREPARED TO DEAL WITH RAISING A GIRL because if she would go through all that I did, there would be no positive thing I could ever say other than "school sucks and these people will not change for years" and that's pretty crappy parenting, if you ask me. Being a girl does not make me a good girl mom by some magical gender default and "those who cannot do, teach" does not work in this scenario either.
I am not a monster for feeling this way and I refuse to not let myself vent about it because people might stumble on this blog. My baby is active and growing and until the doc calls with the u/s results and possibly says otherwise, healthy. That is my goal, because I DO want to be a mom, no matter how inadequate I will be with one gender versus the other. But I AM entitled to how I feel and I'm sure I'm not the only person who has ever had this issue... yet, I still feel like a horrible person anyhow.
