Week 19: Your Baby Gets Superpowers

One funny thing about getting pregnant is that suddenly your life is measured in weeks. It's 40 weeks from start (well, before start, technically) to finish; and each week is brimming with developmental significance. Thanks to ever-improving technology, we know more and more about what happens with a developing fetus from week to week.

So once you're knocked up, there are countless books and websites available to tell you what's happening each week in the mysterious realm of the womb. There's what I like to call the "produce phase," where each week your baby is compared to a particular fruit. This week the baby is the size of a blueberry, next week it's a large raspberry, and the following week it's an olive. I can't tell you how confusing that was for me, trying to figure out what size olive is appropriately bigger than a large raspberry.

Then we move on to plum, peach, avocado, etc., until the baby's size is such that a comparison to a fruit no longer makes sense. So the fruit descriptors are relegated to the mother instead of the baby (uterus the size of a cantaloupe!), and discussions of the baby focus more on other developmental markers like organs, hair, and fingernails.

Now all of this is pretty fascinating, at least to the parents-to-be, but I will say that it's also a little strange to know so much about this tiny person who is with me every day and occasionally kicks me in the belly - but who I've never seen or met. It's also a bit of added pressure, knowing that certain things are developing this week makes me ever more vigilant about every move I make, not wanting to disturb the fragile process.

What's even scarier is that during some of these critical weeks, there are nerve-racking tests designed to screen for a host of chromosomal and other anomalies that could seriously impact the life of the child, or even be fatal. These screening tests are wonderful advances of technology, but their high incidence of false positive results can sometimes make them more anxiety-provoking than reassuring.

But I find myself wondering other things about this little person... Not whether the intestines have re-entered the abdomen through the umbilical cord (they do that!) or about some scary potential condition. Instead, I want to know whether my little guy or girl will have a sweet, easygoing temperament like their father or if we'll experience the dramatic ups and downs of a child more like me. Will he or she be kind to others, have special talents, make contributions to the world? Leap tall buildings in a single bound? :)

It's so amazing and interesting to know what is happening week by week, but it leaves me wanting to know so much more... anticipating the personality, the uniqueness and the fun that's in store in the years to come. In some ways, it's too bad that an ultrasound or other tests can't tell us more encouraging, meaningful and exciting things about our children.

Of course, there is one big, exciting thing new parents do get to know: in a couple of weeks, we'll have the option to find out the gender of the baby. Most parents do opt to "find out" -- and the reason I most often hear is for planning the nursery, etc. But I suspect that if other parents are experiencing what I've experienced, part of the reason is that it's just so nice to hear some good, happy news in the middle of all the waiting and nail-biting.

But on the other hand, maybe anticipating all those exciting things is part of every parent's journey, day by day. Eliminating risks from our kids' lives is not an option after they're born. We also don't get to know ahead of time whether our kids will be talented in a particular way, interested in a certain occupation or activity, gentle or boisterous, healthy or ill... we can't predict, and beyond the influence that we have in raising them as best we can, we can't control how their lives play out. But what we get to do is something altogether more thrilling... we get to watch it all unfold, and to nurture the process as it goes along.

So maybe all this wonderful science has the shadow side of pushing us to think we can somehow predict (or create) perfection in our kids; and that somehow by knowing more about them, we can plan their lives and ours more thoroughly. But as the old Yiddish proverb says, Men plan, G-d laughs. Life isn't always ours to plan - not our own lives, and especially not our children's.

So the "plan" (insert divine laughter here) is that we are not going to find out in a couple of weeks whether our little one -- who I'm happy to report is approximately the length of a standard office stapler -- is a boy or a girl. Sure, it would be fun to know more about our little one; but for now, I'm learning to savor the mystery.