I was talking to a friend about our first pregnancies the other day – whether we went into them wanting to have a boy or a girl, whether we found out in advance of the birth, etc – and I got to telling her my own gender reveal story, which just so happens to be the weirdest one I’ve ever heard of (although if you’ve got a story that’s a contender, please tell me, because I want to read it), and which also ended with me crying in a cafe on Ninth Avenue.
How I found out the sex of my first child: While lying on a table in a Marriott hotel ballroom. In front of about four hundred people. And then I burst into tears.
(…Let me back up. Stay with me; I promise this will make sense – sort of – in a minute.)
At one point during my teenage years growing up in NYC, I landed myself a mid-level modeling agent and started doing occasional commercial-type modeling jobs (meaning shoots for catalogues and face washes as opposed to for, say, Vogue). Once, I was asked to do a runway show at the Javits Center, a huge convention center that spans several blocks of New York City’s West Side, and ended up walking down a runway wearing a wedding dress and carrying a whip, accompanied by two scantily clad men. Perhaps not the most appropriate afterschool activity for a fourteen-year-old, but it was definitely an experience, and there just so happened to be a scout for Ford Models in the audience who was apparently blinded enough by my whip-wielding skills to sign me up for their Kids and Teens division.
So then I spent a couple of years getting to call myself a Ford model. This was super exciting and gave me a much-needed self-esteem boost, but in retrospect it also didn’t make a ton of sense, mostly because at five foot five and more “doofy and earnest” than “mysterious and smoldering,” I really was not especially model-y at all. But that didn’t seem to matter much in the Kids and Teens division: what mattered was that I had juuuuust the right amount of cheery awkwardness to have a decent chance of getting chosen to be in ads for things like breakfast cereal.
My wildly illustrious modeling career ended up petering out around age 16, when I got too old to be in the Kids and Teens category and started needing to compete with actual models, which I could not do. So I focused my energy on acting for the remainder of my high school years, and then put the whole thing on ice when I went off to college.
A little over a decade later, I got pregnant, and my hormones and my mother (“But you used to be a Ford model!”) somehow combined to make me think that it would be an excellent idea to call up a local maternity modeling agency and try to make a few extra bucks posing for catalogues that sold things like bathing suits cut for mothers-to-be. The agency signed me up, and I waited for the jobs to start rolling in.
Except I forgot one key fact: actual models get pregnant, too. And actual models who are pregnant tend to be the ones who book actual pregnant-model jobs.
The sum total of the modeling jobs I got when I was pregnant equaled One. And to call when I ended up getting asked to do “modeling” is a pretty huge stretch, because what the job entailed was showing up at a Marriott hotel and then laying down on a table behind a privacy screen while a doctor from Harvard gave me an ultrasound, projected the images onto a giant screen in the auditorium, and then discussed the findings via microphone for the benefit of the hundreds of assembled doctors and academics. The only thing that was getting “modeled” was my uterus.
When the experience was over I went on my way with the printed-out photo of my baby that the doctor had given me, and it was all extremely weird and not even close to what I had thought I was signing up for, but it was also pretty exciting, because at one point the doctor looked at me and said, “Would you like to know the sex of your child?”
I was only about fourteen weeks pregnant, which I had thought was too early, but apparently the baby was in a good position, or maybe the doctor was just feeling lucky. In any case, I said yes, and learned – via microphone, along with four hundred total strangers – that I was almost certainly having a boy.
And I cried.
Because the idea that I might have a boy – whom I pictured, at the time, as a sports-obsessed alien who would be separated from me by wide, yawning emotional canyons and who I would never really understand or get to know – was simply something that hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t really know much about what little girls were like, but at least I had been one. Little boys were an entirely unknown quantity, and in that moment I was afraid that my son would be so much of a mystery that he wouldn’t even feel like mine.
And then we had our little boy.
And he is sweet and gentle and my best friend, and lies quietly next to me in the mornings eating blueberry waffles while I brush his hair back from his forehead and talk to him about airplanes and dogs and the moon and stars, and what the day will bring.
A modified version of this post originally appeared in Carrying On.
