All Boy

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who is an ultrasound tech offered us a free gender ultrasound.  (Technically, should be called a sex ultrasound, shouldn’t it?)  “Make an appointment for when you hit 15 weeks, and I’ll make sure it’s recorded as No Charge,” she said.  “Think Pink!” I called out, after I’d thanked her and we started to walk away from each other.

We didn’t tell any family or friends about this ultrasound, lest the baby not cooperate.  And if it did, we thought it would be fun to surprise folks with the news.  On Friday morning we met, the two of us, at my OB’s office and waited a few minutes to be taken back to the room.  Once I was propped up on the bed, my friend poured warm goo on my belly and slid the wand across to find a nice profile.  After we’d feasted our eyes on that for a moment or two, she slid the wand around to find the sex, and there it was – wee wee number three.  A boy, a little boy.  I wrote this not long after, at my desk at work.  I can honestly tell you that already these feelings seem a little distant, a little foreign.

We call this one “Tex” for now.  Our third son.  Oh, Lord help my furniture.

Mourning Kate

I am coming around to the idea of three boys.  In order to fully embrace the amount of peni$e$ in my life, however, I am allowing myself just a smidge of time to mourn Kate, the daughter I won’t be having.  We weren’t settled but that was a likely contender for her name.

Ahhh, Kate.  She would have had long brown hair like me, straight like mine.  I would have taught her how to braid it.  I’m not really into bows so she never would have been one of those little girls with huge bows in her hair – I’m more the ponytail and barrettes type.  She’d probably have worn a lot of her older brothers’ less boy-like clothing, because we are frugal types.  She would have looked a lot like me – no offense to my husband’s genes, it’s just when you’re creating a fantasy creature in your image it tends to be, well, your image.  I imagined her all different ways – a girl’s girl, into all the sparkly pink that I am not.  A total introvert, afraid of her own shadow – or a loud and boisterous extrovert, with energy that wears me out.  A style maven, making me feel a little intimidated.  A butch woman, grown up and covered in tattoos, spiked up short hair, rides motorcycles.  I tried to imagine her in all these ways, so that there was no possibility she could disappoint me.  And yet she has – by refusing to come into being even though I wished for her so.

It’s not really the baby girl, or the little girl, that I’ll miss so much.  Wee girls are cute, but so are wee boys – I know this well.  I’m glad I get to trot out the old onesies and favorite little shirts one more time, so familiar and already softened from my loving hugs when they were out and worn the last time.  It’s more the woman that I mourn – the grown up woman and the relationship we might have had, twenty-plus years from now.  I try to be careful of gender absolutism – of presuming that girls are sweeter and quieter, boys rowdier and more simple-minded, girls call home more, that sort of thing.  But the truth is that my body is different from my boys’, and so my life’s experience is, of course, rooted in this old mortal coil of mine.  I’ll fumble my way through teaching the boys about male puberty and all its various accompanying embarrassments, with their father’s guidance.  I wouldn’t have had to fumble with a girl – I’d have known.  Whatever type of woman she turned out to be, she’d have gone through periods and figuring out hair cuts and boobs and all of that sort of thing, and I’d have nodded in solidarity all the way through.  If my sons marry and procreate, their wives will not call me to talk pregnancy aches and pains – they’ll have their own mothers.  There is the potential for knowing laughs there, a closeness, an in-kind sympathy.  In my fantasies I have presumed a good relationship with her, throughout her life, which I am permitted to do now, since she will never live.

I also wanted the opportunity to shape and mentor the mind of a woman in this misogynistic world.  Often people, casually, as a passing joke, have observed my raucous sons and told me – You’re lucky! Girls are so hard!  Boys are simple!  They’re rough, but girls are so mean!  But it was pointed out to me once by another blogger that this, itself, is a perpetuation of misogyny.  In truth, I suffered cruelty (middle-school style) at the hands of mean girls and mean boys back in the day.  And now my own biggest fans are largely female.  My mother and mother-in-law, my three sisters and sister-in-law, my female coworkers, my best friends . . .  I have such great relationships with all of the women who are important to me, which is a blessing.  And I would argue that it shouldn’t be thought of as an anomaly that I have no serious rivalries or beefs with any of these women, although there are lots of them and they’re all totally different from one another.  Sometimes a mother fails you, sometimes a sister is not a true sister and a female friend or coworker is sneakily bitchy and cruel – but the same can be said of fathers, brothers, boys.  I love the women in my life and the relationships I’ve had with them, and I’d hoped to add to my supportive female network by literally adding a female to it, a little daughter who would grow to be a woman and a friend.

So, I didn’t.  I won’t.  No more babies in these cards – three sets of daycare costs and food costs and college costs are about all this family can handle, not to mention that morning sickness is, like, THE WORST.  And that is ok.  I am blessed, I know, to be mourning a hypothetical child, and not a flesh and blood fetus, baby, or child who was lost to me too soon.  You’ll hear not another word of “gender disappointment” out of me after this, because I know where I am blessed – with three strong beating hearts, three living children, three lovely and real and living boys, I cannot honestly lay claim to any kind of real grief.

But just this once, I get to write about the life I could have had, and won’t, and mourn a little bit the daughter I never had, and the mother of a daughter that I’ll never be.