Julie Jay: A blue babygro if it's a boy... and a blue babygro if it's a girl — because it’s 2023, baby

For now, our baby exists in a world where it is neither a boy, nor a girl... just a baby. It is occupying a genderless space where nobody is projecting expectations on it, where the playing field is entirely even, where it is not required to do anything but be, and it’s kind of a magical thing, when you think about it.

Initially, when I found out I was pregnant, I envisaged myself with another little boy, I think partly because I feel I know how to parent little boys now — not necessarily well, mind you — but I could chance writing a Revise Wise study manual on the general gist. Maybe I imagined a little boy because, to my mind, parenting a little girl carries with it a whole new set of challenges, and I’ll be honest when I say I am a little scared of not meeting the requirements, of not being quite up to task.

When people speculate that I’m having a boy, they laugh at the next level of madness which will befall our home in the event of having another mini-male running around.

“They’ll be tearing strips off each other,” these commentators laugh, as terms like “rough-housing” and “rambunctious” are bandied about.

And it strikes me as strange that we still carry such presumptions — who is to say that a boy is going to be any more into the rough and tumble than a little girl?

Don’t get me wrong, when Ted gets together with his male cousins he loves nothing more than throwing sticks into the ether but equally he has at times expressed a fondness for getting his nails painted and on occasion a diamanté plait in his hair.

Similarly, well-meaning friends and family have talked about the balance a girl would bring to proceedings. As a former girl child, I myself brought anarchy rather than order to my domestic sphere, subjecting my twin brother to multiple hostage takings where his Cabbage Patch doll would be hidden and in its place a ransom note would be left listing my demands (which usually involved unlimited telly rights — a strange request given that we had, at the time, two channels. Yes, I grew up in the 17th century).

Given my own personal history, I can assure you that girls don’t necessarily exhibit the most diplomatic of skills within family dynamics. To expect our impending arrival to bring a Mary Robinson-like harmonious presence to our house of crazy based purely on their gender is to be a little presumptuous as to the ways of the world. As anyone who has ever watched the reality show The Hills back in the noughties will tell you, girls can bring chaos and destruction to storylines as much as any of their male counterparts.

The boy/girl binary has changed a lot from when I was a little girl growing up in the ’80s. And, of course, the blurring of these hardened lines as to what a boy should be and what a girl should be can only be a good thing.

But I still think, on the whole, that girls have it a little harder than boys. That is not to say that boys do not have the emotional depth or needs of their female counterparts — some of the most beautifully intuitive and sensitive people I know are men — but rather the world is still not an equal playing field — and, because of that, women have to navigate that world in a different way. And because the world is more complex for girls, parenting girls is more complex, too. It has to be.

Girl or boy, all we can do as parents is to meet kids where they’re at, and see them for who they are. To be loved by someone who hopes to change us is not really to be loved at all, and so all we can hope as parents is that our children trust us enough to let us have a glimpse into what makes them truly happy. And once we know what makes them happy, it is our parental duty to do everything we can to support that, even if that happy isn’t a happy we anticipated.

I will try not to meet our baby with any expectations, but rather let them introduce themselves, at their own pace and speed. If it’s a boy I’ll be dusting off the blue babygros, and if it is a girl I will also be dusting off the blue babygros — because it’s 2023, baby.

And if we are greeted by a cailín beag, I will be using The Gilmore Girls as my guide to mother/daughter dynamics. Yes, forget medieval history — the joy of having had only two telly channels growing up was that The Gilmore Girls and Seventh Heaven would most definitely be my Mastermind special topics should the opportunity present itself. If we can thank RTÉ for anything, it is that.