Michael DEACON
To any prospective fathers reading this column, I have three pieces of advice. One: stop wearing any item of clothing that cost you more than £5. For the next 18 months minimum, everything you wear is guaranteed to be ruined by your child. Unless you get your tailor to sew you a suit made of wet-wipes.
Two: keep a diary, noting down everything your little darling does and says. You’ll love reading it when you’re old. Especially since you won’t be able to remember half of it, what with your memory having been scrambled by all the sleepless nights.
My most important piece of advice for prospective fathers, however, is number three. Whatever you do, don’t throw a gender-reveal party.
When my wife was pregnant seven years ago, the craze for gender-reveal parties hadn’t yet caught on in this country, so we didn’t have one. Which, looking back, is a big relief. Because, as we keep seeing in the news, gender-reveal parties aren’t just a silly fad. They’re actively dangerous – and have even cost people their lives.
At these parties, the parentsto-be announce whether their baby is going to be a boy or a girl – typically by means of some spectacular visual stunt. Setting off blue fireworks for a boy, say, or pink ones for a girl. Other bizarre stunts have involved hot-air balloons, cars, shotguns and even cannons.
All too often, though, the stunts go horribly wrong. Just this week, a man in New York was killed when an explosive device he’d been assembling for a gender-reveal party blew up in his face.
A week before that, a man in Michigan was killed by shrapnel from a “gender-reveal cannon”. Last year, an explosion at a gender-reveal party in California caused a week-long wildfire. And back in 2017, an explosion at a gender-reveal party in Arizona set 47,000 acres of land alight, forced 200 people to flee their homes, and left $8 million (£5.7 million) worth of damage.
All things considered, then, it doesn’t entirely seem worth the trouble. And even if you aren’t put off by the threat of explosions, wildfire, homelessness, lawsuits, imprisonment, bankruptcy and death, there are other risks to consider.
For one thing, some people might find the very concept of your party insensitive. They might argue that, in this day and age, your binary attitude to gender is outdated, prescriptivist and exclusionary. After all, your unborn child may end up identifying as a different gender altogether. And at this stage, you can’t very well ask him, her or them whether he, she or they considers himself, herself or themselves to be a him, a her or a them.
Anyway, even if your gender-reveal party goes off without a hitch, it’s unlikely to be very much fun. First, because the mother-to-be can’t drink – which means the father-to-be can’t drink either, if he knows what’s good for him.
And as for your guests, they’ll be getting sick of having to buy you so many presents. As well as the presents they’ve had to buy for your gender-reveal party, there are the presents they already had to buy for your baby shower, when the pregnancy was announced. And when the baby’s finally born, they’ll no doubt feel compelled to buy yet another round of presents. Making three rounds of presents in all. Just for a single, measly baby.
Imagine if this sort of thing had been going on in Biblical times. It would have been a nightmare for the Three Wise Men. Think of all the extra presents they’d have had to shell out for. By the time Our Lord and Saviour was actually born, Amazon would have been clean out of frankincense and myrrh. And the one who’d found himself having to buy three lots of gold would have been wishing he’d picked out something less expensive, like a Lego Death Star or a Nintendo Switch.
Mind you, you’d have had to be careful, throwing a genderreveal party in those days. What with King Herod’s policy on baby boys, you’d have made sure the fireworks you let off were pink, no matter what kind of baby you had. “Don’t worry, Centurion – our baby is a girl. Definitely a girl. Just like every single baby born in the Bethlehem area this year. Remarkable statistic, isn’t it? I would tell the Guinness Book of Records, only it hasn’t been invented yet.”
At any rate, the whole idea is a lot of nonsense. No one needs a gender reveal party – and it’s high time we knocked this pointless American fad on the head, before wildfires start sweeping Britain, too.
It all just goes to show how quickly times change. Not so very long ago, no one ever knew in advance whether their baby was going to be a boy or a girl. They only found out the moment the child was born.
And they were hardly going to invite a mob of half-cut friends to crowd expectantly round the hospital bed, craning their necks to see whether they should let off the pink party poppers or the blue ones.
“Look, everyone! It’s a boy, it’s a boy!”
“Don’t be daft, Gerald. That’s the umbilical cord.”
Bizarre stunts have involved hot-air balloons, shotguns and even cannons