"Real blood turns brown after thirty minutes. Ten-second rule!"
Your mom and dad, on a scholastic grading scale, are capably intelligent people. And despite generally snooty and tasteful sensibilities when it comes to entertainment, they don't overthink things when they're in-the-moment. Certain individuals' clairvoyant pursuits allow them to procure a movie's twist ending by the second act. Or snark at a page-turner of a novel because they pen the full story arc in their head before they even break the spine in the middle. Or they have a downward smirk, knowing that edgy, experimental, hipster rock band is following the same four-four progression as every other track on the top forty. These people, these workaday Cleo the Psychics, live in the future, always receiving their well-earned pat on the back when the predictable becomes the present.
Your mom and dad are not those people.
"Look at the cuff of his sleeve. There's red on it. But it'll turn brown. It's real this time."
Your dad reads the last line of a novel before starting any story. But he doesn't commune with the divine to navigate those labyrinthine pages to the endpoint. He reads magazines back to front, like there's some errant gene flitting about his DNA, seeking out (with straining, whipping cilia) that path against the natural ebb and flow. And the music he listens to, whether baroque pop, laptronica, or backpacker rap, engages him fully, immersively, but plugs into him only in the moment, only in each individual count of that four-four measure. The depths he explores follow a line like a heart monitor: drilling down and resurfacing, spelunking and spiking, face blue from oxygen deprivation -- then lungs once again flush with air.
"See?" Your dad pauses the movie. "Main Guy wanted to get out of the con, but his brother wanted to be a con man until the day he died. Watch the blood." And, lo and behold, the blood on Main Guy's shirt sleeves turns brown. It's real this time. Main Guy's brother is dead. It's a con. Or rather, it isn't.
But your mom and dad never saw it coming. Well, they did, but only ten seconds before it was actually happening on the screen. That's your mom and dad's Ten-Second Rule.
Your dad raises his fists in the air, triumph smiling across his face at having a ten-second jump on the film's crime-caper twist. In your dad's in-the-moment world, he saw that one coming from a mile away.
Not finding out early whether you're a boy or a girl has indeed proven entertaining. But it's also training your mom and dad to fully experience every moment of your gestation period, discussing possible outcomes, contemplating possible differences, and examining all three-hundred sixty degrees of an otherwise binary outcome. And not telling others what your name is has proven entertaining as well. People leap headlong into guessing games, or visibily restrain themselves from wanting to know. And, on "labor day," once your name is spoken aloud to others for the very first time, they will not have the powers of prediction on their side.
With your sex finally revealed as well, no one will have any powers beyond a fifty-fifty guess as to what you are before then. Not even your mom and dad's ten-second rule will help them. And everyone will be in the moment, finding out who you are for the first time, together.
