As we speak right now, a friend of mine knows exactly what the gender of her child is. Three people in the world know this information right now. She and her husband and the technician that worked the sonogram.

Now the time starts ticking down. How long before they break and tell people? It’s only a matter of time. No one can hold this sort of information for too long.

Pregnancy does weird things to you. Not me personally, of course. But to women (though husbands are somewhat affected). Secrets are no longer a matter of, well, secrecy. Delicate subjects are no longer delicate.

It starts out in hushed tones among the women of your family. They begin discussing things that you don’t want to know about. Nausea. Spotting. Blood. Clots. Smells. Fluids. It’s not something any man wants a part of and you stick your fingers in your ears and say, “lalalalalala.”

That’s because at that point the pregnancy is still an abstract. Your wife still looks normal, she’s not showing yet. Her complexion hasn’t changed. Her hair isn’t different. She’s a little tired, sure, and she pees a lot, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

Then, around five months . . . everything changes. She starts to feel big and uncomfortable and the baby is doing bizarre things to her internal organs. Suddenly these hushed conversations make their way to the public. Nausea turns into vomiting, with explicit descriptions of the retching, the environment. She no longer discretely exits to go to the bathroom. She announces that she “has to piss like a Russian race horse in August.” You don’t know what it means, but you are fearful of it. (By month nine she says things like, “I have to take a leak so bad I can taste it.”)

Of course, once you have the ultrasound, there’s no going back. You’ve seen your wife’s insides. There’s her kidney, there’s her bladder, and I think that’s her liver. My god I hope so. It changes your relationship to have intimate knowledge of your wife’s endocrine and renal systems. It’s weird, especially considering the fact that you know that she’ll never see yours without a Ginsu knife, a fifth of Southern Comfort and comments on how hot her sister looked in that nun outfit at the Halloween party.

But it doesn’t end. The baby keeps growing. And so does the discomfort. By the ninth month the baby is nearly full term and her lungs are sticking out of her ears. And every little bit of discretion your family once had is now gone. You’re discussing things like hemorrhoids with the checker at the supermarket. Suddenly it’s okay to listen to stories about mucus plugs from the Kindergarten teacher and your grandma is talking about burying placenta in the back yard for good luck.

None of this seems to bother the woman because, well, she’s just focused on getting the baby out. (And let’s not fool ourselves guys, as excited and impatient as she is, she’s also terrified. There are so many questions . . . will there be pain? Will the baby be okay? Will there be complications? What if I have to go into surgery? What if I hemorrhage? What if? What if? What if? They don’t know. Even if this is their fourth child, so many things are different and she’s terrified that something will go wrong. It’s a natural fear because, even though you can’t understand this, she already knows the baby. They already have a connection.)

So, prepare yourselves guys. Keeping the gender a secret is just one thing. There are so many other things that will come to light. But once you start talking about massaging the perineum, I’m outta here.