It's a boy!

This post made me put this book in my Amazon cart.

While I was pregnant, we made a point of not finding out the sex of the baby. I suppose if I were pushed, I would say I often wanted a girl during my pregnancy, in large part because I didn't think I would know what to do with a boy. But then there were those times I looked over at R. and could just picture him father to a son, and then I wanted a boy. I wanted to watch R. show Small Boy the tractors and threshers at his parents' farm; to build little dams in the same woods he built dams in as a child; to be boys together. I think R. would say he often wanted a girl so that he could watch us be girls together. At any rate, we had gone to such lengths to get me pregnant that I can honestly say all we wanted was a live birth. When I was briefly hospitalized with contractions at 34 weeks I wasn't thinking boy or girl, I was thinking birth weight and lung maturity. The contractions subsided, my doctor sent me home, and I carried Small Boy to term. When I went into labor, the sex of the baby was still a mystery.

Now, nine months on, I can't imagine any baby other than Small Boy. I can't imagine a girl, and I can't imagine a boy with a different personality. And I know exactly what to do with him. He likes when he hold him high overhead and play airplane. He likes to be held upside-down. He likes when I zip around the house in my office chair with him in my lap, making screetching tire sounds and pretending to crash into the walls after taking the corners too fast. He likes his buckets, but his favorite toy is pilot/mechanic (pronounced "pilot-slash-mechanic"). He is all boy, and I wouldn't have him any other way.

The thing is, when the baby was born, it wasn't like the movies. Nobody said "It's a boy!" and held him up for us to see. The baby was placed immediately on my naked chest and then covered with one of those metalic warming blankets that marathon runners get at the end of a race. I stared at its little face, so alert, staring back at me with big dark eyes, and counted fingers, and said "Hello. Hi there. I'm your mom" over and over. And this sounds unbelievable, and it is unbelievable to me now because he had such an old man face when he was born he could only have been a boy, but for the first two minutes we didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. Nobody told us, and we didn't check. And in those two minutes I fell in love with my child. Not my son, not my daughter, but my child. My child, unencumbered by my stereotypes or my pink- or blue-colored expectations.

I'm so glad for those two minutes. In those two minutes I saw my child as it is and I fell into a pure uncomplicated love. And only then, only then when I was so far hopelessly gone that it didn't even matter, did R. say "We have a Small Boy."

I'll always treasure those two minutes.

It's a boy.