Christina and I chat with my parents every so often; given the time zone differential, it’s easier to make an event of it than to just ring up the phone. Last night was one such event, and my mom wanted to make some plans. It became apparent that Christina’s status was extremely relevant to this discussion, so I let her know that Christina and I are expecting.

(Note to self: find a way to work in a pun: “became apparent” -> “become a parent”. There’s got to be something I can do with that.)

She was over the moon, naturally, but one of her first questions was whether Christina’s mom already knew. We had to admit that this was true, and she said she’d expected as much; this isn’t the kind of news a woman can keep from her own mother.

It’s true, and it made me wonder: this is clearly gender inequality, but is it problematic? Based on nothing but shared intuition, we’ve decided that this is a little girl; thinking in terms of having a daughter makes me want to examine very precisely what gender roles might shape her future, and how we can support or subvert them as appropriate.

Sidebar: we haven’t even properly begun the hunt for names. I have grand plans for an Amazon-style machine learning thing in which both parents independently rate a few dozen names, and then the machine consults the database and generates a bunch that you both should like. “Consumers like you also ordered…” Of course, that depends on more free implementation time than I currently have, so we’ll have to see if it happens in time.

In the meantime, we’re calling the kid Olive as a kind of shorthand. Why so, given that Olive and all its variations (Oliver, Olivia, etc.) are on both our “never” lists? You’re supposed to use the first urine of the morning for early detection pregnancy tests, but we like to sleep in and not fret about tests first thing in the morning. Christina got up early in the morning to pee, as pregnant ladies so often do, and collected the sample into a (cleaned) jar which had originally contained olive-flavored pasta sauce. She then stuck it in the fridge and came back to bed. I slept through the entire procedure. Later, we got up and fretted together while the test worked. Naturally, I joked, when the result comes in, it’ll say “Congratulations! You contain an olive.”

I haven’t come to any conclusions about the implications of women tending to tell their own mothers about pregnancy long before they tell their partners’ mothers, but the key fact is that the cat is now out of the bag. Both my parents know, and they’ll probably spread the word to the rest of the family. That’s actually kind of convenient, to be honest, but it does rather spoil the plan of a big Christmas reveal. That is such a tiny disappointment, though; it would be petty to let it affect me.

So now our secret is safe, because the chance of letting this slip early to friends or acquaintances is much lower than it was of letting family know, and now the family knows. It’s only two more weeks or so until we’re no longer trying to hide any of this, which will be something of a relief! For now, we’re just keeping a lid our excitement.

The author of one of the books for new dads I’ve bought claimed that, in the early stages of his wife’s first pregnancy, he would occasionally get so focused on work that he would forget about his impending fatherhood for days at a time. This has most emphatically not happened to me!