Our baby is more hypothetical than most – after nine months in utero it’s still, as far as we’re concerned, sexless and nameless. It’s the developmental equivalent of an egg avatar on Twitter, a blank slate with none of its default settings yet amended.

We know some couples who had their child’s name picked out six months before arrival, who’d speak knowingly about ‘little Flo’ or ‘Alfie’, recalling them by name, as if they are longstanding dinner party companions with whom they co-own a time share. When we speak about ours, we end up describing it in the chilly, abstract manner of a bodily growth. We love it, we’re delighted by it, it’s just that we have no idea what it is. Neither I nor my wife are particularly sure why we avoided finding out the gender. I think we thought it would be nice to have an extra surprise to look forward to. Looking back, this seems charmingly naive. Even amid all the excitement, terror and alarm of discovering we were going to bring a new life unbidden into the cosmos, we obviously felt there was room to add an additional bit of spice to proceedings, on the off-chance we didn’t find the birth of our first child sufficiently diverting in and of itself.

When I told my dad we weren’t going to find out the baby’s sex he first asked me if we were going to have ‘one of those gender-fluid births’. He said this in that ‘what is the world coming to?’ tone he uses exclusively for regrettably modern ideas like jeans, or garlic, or the one-way road briefly instituted between Monaghan and Castleblayney. He even suggested we were being impractical, as it would affect how we decorate its room. This I found particularly rich coming from a man who painted every one of his 11 children’s rooms in the same magnolia off-white you find in Irish hardware stores listed as ‘famine egg’.

The only thing we do know about the child is that it will be highly Irish

The baby’s name also, is a tough one. I spend all my time telling my wife that her suggestions sound like fonts. She’s keen to avoid me naming her child with a mouthful of Gaelic so weaponised it would make its London upbringing a living hell. The trouble is we’re both right. Every name we think of is awful. With a week to go, still none jump out. Some say it’ll present itself to you when you meet your baby; that upon seeing its face for the first time you’ll know exactly the title that will suit this brand-new person right down to the ground. I would find this easier to believe if I’d met more babies named Sunburned Van Morrison, or Phil Mitchell Emoji.

The only thing we do know about the child is that it will be highly Irish. I’m as pale as a communion wafer, so resolutely pasty I once got a tan from my phone’s brightness being on full. My wife is whiter still, so lacking in melanin she’s practically translucent. Maybe our baby will come out entirely transparent, like one of those cute, clear little Brazilian tree frogs you see in National Geographic. It could make its bowel movements easier to monitor at least.

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