So, at the grand old age of 38 I'm now 14 weeks pregnant with my third child. I have two feisty, disobedient, fiercely stubborn loving little boys aged 4 and 2 who fill me with joy just looking at them. Even when I am repeatedly called into school because they do things like spend half an hour trying to open the fire door and set the alarm off, or just get up in the middle of lessons and run off down the school field making the teachers chase them.
I'm in the last year of my GP training. I absolutely hate being pregnant. After seeing so many horrible things that have happened in labour, childbirth and all the rest of it, together with feeling so crap I despise the whole thing (and thought twice about ever bothering). The only thing that I look forwards to is finding out what I am having, so that I can think of a name, and look forwards to meeting my baby instead of just feeling so rotten and sick.
At 21 weeks pregnant just after finding out that I was having my second little boy I went into work. I went to see a patient who was a little girl. She was there with her Nana. We did our business and just as they were about to leave, Nana said;
"You're having a boy aren't you?" Startled, I turned around to face her.
"How do you know?" I asked, trying to remember if she one of the radiographers who worked in the Ultrasound department.
"I'm a Romany Gypsy" she said. "You wouldn't swap that boy for anything would you?" She asked.
"No." I said without any hesitation whatsoever. All I cared about was whether or not my scan was showing whether I was having a healthy baby or not. To be honest, I hadn't even given the gender much thought at all.
"But don't worry, you'll have your girl next." She said.
With that, she smiled at me, got up and left as I caught the flies in my mouth.
Three years later I'm now pregnant with baby number three. This time, I feel my age. I can tell the difference between having my first and this one. All I have wanted to do is eat sweets. I'm quite often caught stuffing my face with crackers as patients walk into my room. Plus, all I've done is worry that there is something wrong with him/her. Slight reassurance from the nuchal scan and tests so far, but us Doctors don't get everything right now do we? Furthermore, this is going to sound really really stupid:
I love my two boys more than anything. For the whole of my pregnancy, I have been calling baby 'he'. On the scan, it just looks like my other two boys looked like. People keep saying to me 'aw wouldn't it be lovely to have a girl' and 'aw I hope you have a girl next'. And then there are the people who seem to think that I've had a third child to 'have a girl'. I don't know if its pregnancy hormones, but I find this so disrespectful to my lovely boys. Furthermore, if I'm having a girl, I just know that people will say 'oh how lovely, god imagine another boy'. Again, I will find this so disrespectful to my boys.
To cut a long story short, I hope I have a lovely healthy baby and I don't care what it is. But if the Gypsy lady was right, strange as it sounds, part of me will seriously grieve for a little boy that never arrived and would have been every bit as loved and wanted as a little girl.