"It's a girl!"

People who know me well also know that the subject gender is one of my favourite ones.

Gender is also a subject that becomes highly obvious and important when you're about to have a baby.
One of the issues my husband and I had to discuss was whether or not to find out the sex of the baby, when we did the ultrasound.

I first did not want to know. Mainly because I do not think and do not want the sex to matter.

My husband on the other hand really wanted to know. He said that it would help him connect with the baby at this early stage. Not because it would matter whether or not it was a boy or a girl, but just because it would be easier for him to picture the baby and imagine the baby if he got to know the sex. That made me even more sceptical as I felt that made the sex more important than it is.

Finally I did give in though, and agreed to find out the sex. It's a girl!

And my husband was right in one thing. It did make it easier for him to connect. Because since the day we found out, he has been planning, dreaming and imagining our daughters future. She's going to be both a Formula 1 champion - the first female and black one. On top of that she's becoming the president of Ghana or maybe the Primeminister in the UK.

A collegue of mine later gave me a good argument for finding out the sex when doing the ultrasound. She meant that by not finding out people make the sex a bigger issue than it is. They say they want it to be a surprise. What kind of surprise is that when the sex really doesn't matter? The surprise is the baby, the individual, not the sex! Just as studying the heart, the legs, the lungs, the stomach, we might as well also observe the penis or vagina. Because that's mainly all it is; a body part, an organ.

Another friend gave me a good reason to not find out the sex. She said that today we try to have too much control, we monitor everything, we want to know everything, and a pregnancy is something natural that sort of takes care of it self, so why not just let go? Why not just try to accept that we do not need to know it all. And that, she said, was her reason for not finding out.

Both arguments are good arguments. Both women are highly intelligent women that I respect a lot. Therefore my conclusion is that people can do whatever they want as long as they themself feel that it's the right thing to do. And as long as they do it for themselves and not because "that's the way it supposed to be".

I did not feel a hundred percent when finding out the sex, because I only did it because it was important to my husband. Now I am happy that I did it, because my collegue helped me find a good argument that worked for me too.

Finally, I still do not understand when people say that the only reason to not find out the sex, is because of the surprise, because they want to here the words "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!". I find that so unimportant. But as I said before, we all make our own choices for (hopefully) our own reasons.