Gender Reveals and Birth: A Doula’s Thoughts on Control and Letting Go

At the moment, every time I open Instagram, I am hit with another gender reveal.

It feels like my feed has completely locked into it, and with every thumb flick I am seeing balloons, confetti cannons and cakes filled with coloured sponge. It even came up on This Morning the other week talking about different ways to do a gender reveal, and it really got me thinking about the link between finding out the gender of your baby and birth.

Now, do not get me wrong. I love finding any excuse for a party or a get together. I have absolutely no judgement on couples who want to find out the gender of their little ones. It is such a lovely thing to celebrate, and celebrating anything to do with a baby will never fail to put a huge smile on my face.

But there is a small niggly voice in my mind (which very much comes with the territory of being a doula and questioning things) that always asks…

“Why do you need to know?”

I have put this question to close friends before, and often the answer is:

“I want to be prepared.”

And I will say, “Don’t you want a surprise?”

And the conversation usually flows into something like this…

“I want to have everything ready, prepare the nursery, buy the right clothes, pick a name. I like to be organised. It makes me feel more in control.”

And there it is… control.

This is where that small niggle of curiosity comes from for me.

Because do not get me wrong, anyone who knows me knows I love to be organised and prepared. Going somewhere new? I am straight on Google Maps looking at street view to see what the parking is like. When I was pregnant, I was nesting from 20 weeks. I even had a professional organiser come round for seven hours to sort the loft so I could tell you what size socks were in which box. It was a lot.

Birth and labour prep? Constant videos, courses, books, one to ones, holistic therapies… you name it, I tried it.

And I also knew something about myself.

I can be a bit of a control freak.

So for me, finding out the gender became something bigger.

This was my first real mental exercise in letting go.

I knew I was having a baby, but I could not control whether that baby would be a girl or a boy. I would find out eventually, so I chose to let go of that control.

Instead, I focused on trusting my body. I bonded with my bump, visualised the birth I wanted, and pictured the moment my baby arrived. I imagined the excitement of my husband telling me who they were in that moment.

And I cannot help how much this relates to labour and birth.

Let me explain…

You can spend your whole pregnancy preparing for labour and birth, and this is a great thing to do (please do not think I am telling you not to), but really, it is like trying to predict the future. It is just not possible. You do not know how labour and birth are going to unfold for you.

But you do know you will have a baby at the end of it.

Having the mindset of letting go, trusting your body to do what it is capable of, and moving with what is happening without holding yourself back because you cannot control it, will massively help.

It might seem like something really small (although it can feel like a big task), but practising letting things unfold, I believe, can make a huge difference when the time comes to have your baby.

So at the end of all of this, my ask to you if you are thinking about finding out the gender of your baby is this…

Ask yourself:

“What kind of person am I?”

“What will I gain from knowing this?”

If this has got you thinking about your own birth preparation and how you might begin to trust your body more, I would love to support you.

You can get in touch to chat about how I work as a doula, or come and find me over on Instagram where I share more honest thoughts like this.

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Larri Whiteway

@larenadoula

https://www.larenadoula.co.uk