Team Blue

I always appreciate a good moment of comic relief when I'm overcome with anxiety. So I was actually more than a little relieved when the cap flew out of the gel bottle yesterday as the tech squirted gel on my middle in preparation for my 18-week anatomy scan, sending a big clump of warm goo sliding down toward the top of my pants. I laughed out loud, though the tech (who seemed, overall, lacking in humor), ironically, didn't think it was as funny as I did. It broke up the intensity of the moment.

She started the scan and, for inexplicable reasons, opted to first focus on one of the uterine fibroids that, yes, I am aware that I have. Can someone please tell me why they do this? Are they trying to drive us crazy? I came here to make sure that the child growing inside of me is thriving and healthy. Would you mind leaving that benign mass on the other side of my uterus alone until we get that 411? I asked her if she could please first take a quick peek at the baby to be sure he or she was okay ("go with the flow" is, unfortunately for health care providers, not my motto in situations like this). She assured me that she'd already seen the baby move before focusing on the fibroid, wrapped up her scrutiny of other parts and then panned over to the baby, whose steady, beating heart we saw immediately.

She slowly made her way across the anatomical landscape of the baby, pointing out the four chambers of the heart, the stomach, the kidneys, an arm bone and the umbilical cord. She spent a little too much time on the baby's brain, which sent my decreasing anxiety right back up the scale. Sensing this, she suggested that maybe she wasn't talking enough, telling me what she was doing. I told her a play-by-play would be really helpful, and it turned out to be, particularly as I squinted at the screen trying to decipher what I was seeing. Frankly, I don't know how they get anything from those images. I kept uttering "uh-huh" everytime she asked if we could see certain things, only because I felt it would be a poor reflection on my nascent motherhood if I admitted that actually, I couldn't see my baby's parts at all.

But I did see the baby's gorgeous, unmistakeable profile. The stretching out of long fingers and the adorable heel of a foot. A real, boisterous baby moving every which way inside of me. And oh, would it be impossible for someone to stop themselves from falling head-over-heels.

We'd told her that we wanted to know the gender, but as she was wrapping up she still hadn't gotten a clear view. She got a couple more pictures and then said she had everything she needed. Come again? She may have had everything she needed, but we were missing our one opportunity to get that critical information. I asked her, I'm afraid in a voice that may have had a tinge of whine in it, if she could do one eensy weensy last quick scan to see if she could find the gender-identifying part. I wasn't sure what she'd say – as I said, she wasn't the warmest – but she complied. And this time she found it right away. She asked if we could take a guess based on what was on the screen. I didn't see anything distinguishable, so I assumed a girl. "Look again," she said. "I don't think so." We took a closer look, and my husband (naturally) saw it first. She couldn't get a clear view of the whole thing, which made her think there was a small margin for error. But unless there is a random twig or pencil or other foreign object in there, we're having a boy. The other tech looked at it and said, 100%, it's a boy.

A boy. Oh boy. Let the fun begin. Though I felt terrible guilt admitting to myself that I was wishing for one or the other (how could I, after everything I'd been through, dare to hope upon hope that the baby would be anything but whatever it is?), I've always imagined myself as a mother to boys. Loud, rowdy, larger-than-life boys that I would drive around to hockey practice and other boy things. And here, spinning around in my uterus, is one of them. How can I describe the joy?