Since moving to the U.S., I’ve learned that there are many things that Americans unnecessarily over-celebrate. From football players trotting on to the pitch at the start of a game (which is apparently deserving of smoke bombs, fireworks, and inflatable tunnels, even though they do this a couple of times a week during the season – and get paid a fuck-ton of money to do so), to high school graduations (“Well congratulations for managing do what 85% of the population does…and sure, let’s have a 4-hour ceremony to celebrate it!”) – hell there are even kindergarten ‘graduations’. Draft picks…nominations for awards…there’s just no end to occasions deemed perfect for a’whoopin’ and a’hollerin’.
But the thing I find hardest to comprehend is the ‘gender reveal’. For the uninformed (of whom I am truly jealous) this is where soon-to-be parents have this event where they formally announce whether they are expecting a boy or a girl. Yes, an event. A simple card, or a group text isn’t enough – it has to be spectacular – presumably so that it stands out from the other 3.79 million births that take place in America annually. Typically, this involves fireworks, pyrotechnics, pink or blue smoke bombs detonated in increasingly-imaginative ways…and occasionally deadly wildfires. How is this a thing, now? And where do we go from here? Streaming parties for conception videos??
Is the gender of your baby really that important that it has to be announced to the world (which is significantly more people than actually care) with maximum pomp and circumstance? Does the announcement really have to be filmed and posted to YouTube for maximum ‘Likes’? This should just be a private conversation between the prospective parents and close friends and family who might be interested. It should literally just be “Hey, we found out we’re having a boy”. “OK, cool.” and then you move on to discuss more consequential things, like whether a centaur would wear his pants on his back legs or front legs, or whether Captain Hook was secretly devastated that all the kids called him “Hook’ behind his back because of his deformity, or anything else, really.
Look, I’m happy for you and hope your baby is healthy and happy, but tone it down a bit, eh? The gender of your baby is a 50:50 outcome that you literally have NO CHOICE over. So why are we celebrating it like you just won an Olympic gold medal? Again, I am happy for you, but whether you have a boy or girl has about as much impact on everyone else as me deciding where to grab dinner tonight…and you don’t see me setting off red, white, and green confetti cannons while sliding into view on a giant, inflatable breadstick just to announce that I’ve chosen Olive Garden. Again.
Honestly, I didn’t even find out the gender of either of my first two children (boy, then girl, for all the difference it makes to you) until they popped out – it was a nice surprise, and a shared personal moment between us parents. (We only found out the gender of Three because we were moving [continent] before the due date, and wanted to know whether we could ditch the boy clothes or girl clothes we’d saved from the first two.) And I honestly don’t feel that I, the kids, or our close friends and family missed out on anything by not knowing beforehand.
No-one in their right mind should be happier with or disappointed by your announcement of a boy versus a girl. Certainly not the parents who will love the child regardless, and if anyone else feels strongly either way, fuck ’em. You don’t need that kind of conditionality in your (or your baby’s) life.
So yay to you for getting pregnant, and I hope everything goes well, and your baby is born beautiful and healthy, with ten fingers and ten toes, and is loved. Let me know what you end up having so I can get it an appropriate gift, but don’t feel you need to make a big song and dance about announcing the gender before then. And if you do, don’t invite me to come watch. Besides, I’m too busy trying to decide the best way to reveal my choice of underwear for today – currently choosing between plaid boxers and black briefs. Follow me on Insta to see which I go with!
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