My Wife Is Having a Dragon

We tromped over to our local radiology lab on Monday to get a look at the little one, still lovingly referred to as Susanne’s “parasite,” and were amazed at how much more development has happened in the last 12 weeks. There were definitely leaping hearts in the room watching every heart flutter and gulp of the wee one’s mouth.

It also appears that we’re going to have a dragon. With the bones highlighted stark white against the dim gloom of the fluid around the fetus, arm movements looked like broad wings, and the spinal cord glowed like a long tail. This is why baby dragons need to be hatched in eggs—those spikes could do a lot of damage! I looked over at Susanne to gauge her reaction; certainly there will be a lot of press coverage, almost none of it focused on my trans status. At least that’s a relief.

One thing the ultrasound doesn’t tell us is color. I hear green and blue dragons are all the rage now, while red dragons are passe and gold dragons are being hunted down by poachers looking to make a fast buck. Damn that Glenn Beck and his gold enterprises!

Our baby fluttered its wings and attempted to breathe fire, which in the liquid environment of my wife’s reproductive system, provided scant opportunity for such things. The technician pushed with her sound waves against Susanne’s belly from every angle possible.

“It’s little legs are curled up under it, see,” she asked.

I stared at the amorphousness in front of me and nodded, even though I had no idea what she was talking about.

Afterwards, I called my mother to tell her everything looked good, from the heartbeat to the the activity, to the umbilical cord that snatches away Susanne’s oxygen and nutrients to feed our future offspring.

“Did you find out if it’s a boy or a girl,” she asked with hope in her voice.

I’ve told her more than once that we are not going to find out until the birth. The technician even had us look away from the monitor at one point so we could keep the surprise for ourselves.

“Nope, we don’t know, Ma,” I said, attempting not to show any impatience with her repeated question on this topic.

“You know,” she said. I could tell she’d been filled to the brim with suspicion. “You know and you’re just not sharing it with me.”

“I really don’t know.”

She harrumphed at me, dissatisfied, wanting a revelation.

“For thousands of years people haven’t known the sex before birth,” I offered.

“For thousands of years people urinated outside. But you have a toilet, right?”

I laughed into the phone, not at her, per se, but just because she’d made exactly the kind of point I would make, were I in her position.

“We just want it to be a surprise for a little while longer,” I said. I could tell, even though she hadn’t verbalized it, that she was capitulating.

“Okay, honey,” she said. “Everything looks good?”

“Everything looks good, Ma.”

I refrained from discussing the whole dragon thing. We can wait a few more months before we announce that, too.