4 weeks to go until my due date.
It’s interesting the things people start to say this far along. “Enjoy it!” “Are you tired yet?” “How exciting!” It hasn’t failed to amaze me once just how much we get involved in OPP: other peoples’ pregnancies. In this day and age where we’ve managed to make social interaction a resurrected art form, and in a city famed for its beautiful yet frequently fake denizens, when it comes to the pregnant woman walking down the street, everyone has an opinion and is happy to shout it from the rooftops.
“Aw, it’s a boy,” says a male parking attendant, as I hand him my keys.
“Well, we don’t know. We’re waiting to find out.” I say this with a smile, even though I dread saying it at all. Like Pandora’s box, this inevitably opens the discussion to guesses as educated as a backcountry grandmother from the 1800s. Without a second thought, everyone from cashiers to postal workers tell me with absolute confidence that I’m having a [insert gender here]. At first, I found the interest charming, but now, months later, the random nature of their guesses grates on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. This is my life, I think with annoyance, not f&%king Wheel of Fortune. Their guesses are for their own entertainment, a way to pass five minutes of a lifetime, and yet whether it’s a girl or boy means nothing to me.
If it’s a boy, will he be anything like my father? I pray not, and I’m not usually one much for praying. (My nephew has his smile and only now, years later, have I stopped being floored, half in horror, when I see it.) If it’s a girl, will she be like mother? Only the good, only the good, I half-chant to myself, imagining the genetic distribution of personality traits spread out before my belly like a roulette wheel. “Half angel, half devil, ” I half-joke to family and friends. (The spouse is the angel, in case you had any doubt.) A strong girl, a sensitive boy, a charmer, an adventurer, a sweetheart – I want to shake the next person that asks me “Is it a girl or a boy” and scream “It’s the personality that you should be concerned with!” God, if only someone would walk up to me and smile and say, “I’m sure your child will do something good for the world one day.”
But maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Maybe I should just be grateful that people seem to care at all. Like the woman that walked up to my sister when she was expecting and warned her about consuming mercury in fish while pregnant. She wished someone had warned her a decade ago when she was pregnant, that she might have prevented her son’s disabilities. In our increasingly self-oriented bubble lives, maybe I should be pleased to see Old World-style community support still kicking, somehow, somewhere in the interest of people around me. We’ve lost it all otherwise, in fear of litigation for being concerned for our neighbors, in fear of intruding on each others’ isolated lives.
“How much longer?,” the attendant asks, actually touching my belly. So far, almost no one has touched me without asking first.
“About four more weeks,” I say, somewhat alarmed at the touching, but slightly amused because he seems so genuinely concerned.
“Ah, so soon! You be careful driving,” he says. “Dangerous, and hot out.”
Perhaps the village hasn’t entirely forgotten its part in raising the child.
