It is a bit of a cliché, but it has been my lifelong dream to become a mother. Since I was a little girl I have imagined myself with lots of children, a happy, noisy, messy home with me at the centre. I was lucky enough to fall pregnant in June 2016 without any complications or difficulties, and I am grateful every day for that, and in March 2017 I delivered our beautiful baby girl – a little pink bundle who came into the world just after midnight, sharing her birthday with my mum. Labour was something else (see previous blog post A Mother is Born) , but I was lucky enough to really enjoy my pregnancy (post 15 weeks when the dreadful and constant nausea wore off) and I honestly believe that my decision to remain “team yellow” contributed to this enjoyment…
In this day in age, we literally have to wait for nothing. Ever. Want to find something out? Google it. Want to find that perfect party outfit? Online shopping. Want to buy a single? Download it. Watching a TV series? Binge watch the whole 5 series in 3 nights. And that’s fantastic, I can’t deny that I have done all of these things and I would be pretty lost without Google – particularly as a mum! But for me, finding out the gender of my unborn baby was just worth the wait.
I’m not saying I can’t understand why people do find out, and there is no right and wrong way to go about your pregnancy – it is, after all, yours. I fully get that people want to know, so they can shop for pink or blue, decide on a name, and decorate the nursery accordingly and so on… I even understand that for some people, they want to manage their expectations – I am not naïve and I know that people have preferences, and so finding out their baby’s gender gives them time to accept if it isn’t what they would have preferred. But for me none of these things mattered.
First of all, I genuinely had no preference as to what gender my baby would be. It would be loved, cherished and nurtured whatever it was, and although I have actually had people say to me about future babies, “no you would like one of each, really, you might think you wouldn’t but you would” and I can honestly say that if I had 20 baby girls I would still be happy, I would still love, cherish and nurture every one of them and I would not feel like I was missing a little blue one, because for me being a mother is the cherry on top of the icing on the cake of my life, and I just don’t care about the gender of the babies that I am mothering.
Waiting to find out my babies gender, for me, was exciting. I wasn’t impatient for my pregnancy to end because I loved feeling our tiny little human in there, wriggling around, turning over, and hiccupping at least once a day. My partner actually said to me on one occasion, “you’re not going to like it when this baby is born and you have to share them with everyone – you won’t have them all to yourself anymore,” and I realised he was right. I adored the fact that this little baby depended solely on me to keep them alive, warm, safe. I loved that I was the one that felt them wriggling around, turning over and hiccupping. So I didn’t wish away one second of my pregnancy, because I knew it would be over in a flash, and I revelled in the not knowing, in the talking about both pink and blue names, looking at both sets of clothes in the baby shops and thinking about what I would buy when I knew what we were blessed with.
I love neutral baby clothes – there really is nothing like a brand new baby all dressed in white, in a clean white moses basket with a clean white blanket. It’s the stuff my dreams have been made of for years – so it didn’t bother me in the slightest that we couldn’t buy gender specific clothes. In fact, quite the opposite, had I known the gender of our baby I wouldn’t have been able to control myself – I would have bought the whole baby section in Next, Zara and all of the supermarkets. And then when the baby was born, the gifts she received were out of this world. Our whole front room looked like a baby store – she was showered with love and gifts and there would be no way she would ever have gotten to wear all of those clothes, as well as the ones I could have easily bought before she arrived. So in actual fact, being team yellow saved us an absolute fortune.
I also love our neutral nursery, which we decorated in grey, yellow and cream. It is by far my favourite room in our house, it’s calming and peaceful and it looks so clean. 3 of the walls are painted in a soft magnolia, and the feature wall is papered in a lemon, grey and cream geometric pattern, accompanied with grey curtains, a grey wooden floor and glossy white furniture. I don’t regret that the room isn’t decorated in pink or blue, because it is beautiful. After our baby girl was born, she received some beautiful gifts for her bedroom – some of them pink – and all of them fit perfectly in her nursery, they don’t look out of place one bit. In the future, I want more babies (how many is still up for debate…) and so the nursery will remain the nursery, and Freya will move into the bigger bedroom that is currently a dumping ground. We won’t redecorate, because we won’t need to – the room is perfect for any gender.
Speaking of future babies, people have asked me whether I would find out next time, whether I would want to be practical and know what to keep of Freya’s such as clothes and toys. I do get that people find this practical and necessary, and sometimes they have had the surprise with their first child and want to experience knowing the second time. The only thing that does tempt me just a tiny little bit is having a gender reveal – those who know me will know that I find any excuse for a party – but no, I can 100% guarantee that I am, and always will be, team yellow.
Mama Nat 