Birth is the only ‘gender reveal’ you need

There are no surprises anymore.

In our day and age, we seem focused on making our lives as predictable as possible.

Every single day for nine months, I wondered who it was.

We can flatten the roller coaster otherwise known as life. We can know the weather tomorrow or the day after. We can know what’s going to kill us with blood tests, scans involving complex probabilities, and a catalog of family history. Someday soon we might even be able to know just exactly how many years we have left with 99.9% accuracy.

Of course, it’s easier to plan that way. And I’m sure we’d all agree one of the major benefits of technology is that it often lets us eliminate unpleasant surprises: Nobody ever wished for a more “interesting” medical checkup or airplane flight.

Suprised by joy

The danger is that in our eagerness for certainty and control, we end up eliminating the good surprises as well. Surprises that make you smile, rather than shudder: opening a thoughtfully wrapped gift, finding out you got the promotion, learning that a girl you’ve been thinking about has been thinking about you too.

Remember that youthful feeling? It’s youthful because it takes a certain optimism and playfulness to embrace surprise — especially when it would be easier to just cut to the chase.

The greatest, most meaningful surprise I’ve experienced has been as a new father.

The waiting game

You wait nine long months, planning for the future as best you can. Then one day you rush to the hospital. More waiting as your wife goes through labor, as you do whatever you can — if anything — to help her through it.

Then, in one incredible moment, you find out if you have a son or a daughter. There’s nothing like that surprise.

Today, not many “wait to find out,” as we say. Most parents are anxious to know if it’s a boy or a girl, so as soon as they are able to do the test and find out, they do the test and find out.

I get it. I really do. It’s the most exciting thing in the world knowing that you are going to be a parent, and you just want to know if it’s a boy or a girl. Who is that little person growing inside?

It’s hard to wait all that time, refusing to know when you could so very easily know. All you have to do is call your doctor, and in a few seconds he can tell you.

That way you can buy the right clothes and paint the nursery the right color. And honestly, that little moment on the phone is its own little surprise.

Photos by Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images, Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Mystery meet

But waiting is better. It really is. We always wait with our kids, and I have to say that nothing in life compares to that one incredible moment. It’s when they arrive. When they leave the protected world of their mother’s womb and join us in ours.

We see them for the first time, in flesh and blood, and we know who they are, or at least one thing about who they are. “It’s a girl!” Or, “It’s a boy!”

Waiting was hardest with our first. There was already so much we were excited about, anxious about, confused about, and generally worried about, that holding off and not learning whether or not we were having a boy or a girl was pretty tough.

Every single day for nine months, I wondered who it was. But I waited and only found out I had a son, in one heart-shaking breath, two seconds before I held him.

God knows

With our second, it was easier. We thought it was going to be a boy. Our first was a boy, it was all we knew, and for some reason we just swore it was going to be the same. We had a feeling.

We felt wrong; it wasn’t a boy, and learning that it wasn’t early one November morning after our car broke down on the way to the hospital was a shock no smaller than that of a few years prior when we found out we had a son.

It’s the waiting and knowing that the answer is known, but not by you. Knowing that someone is in there — and we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but we are going to know soon — is a nine-month tease unlike anything else we experience.

It’s a tension that builds, a question that keeps being asked. And then, finally, it’s answered in one euphoric moment and no matter the answer, it’s a good one, and you just can’t believe it.

The greatest surprise in life is the surprise of life. Babies — they are life. New, beautiful, fresh, pure, innocent life. They are our future. In reality and symbol. And so we wait all those months, and when finally we have an answer to our question, we hold them and look at their little watery eyes and ask them quietly, knowing that they can’t possibly respond, “Who are you going to be?”

There are still surprises left in life.

3 hours ago