I Thought I Wanted a Girl

I wanted a girl. I wanted my 3-year-old to have a sister. I wanted to be able to use the term, “the girls” when talking about my kids. I wanted to recycle my daughter’s clothing and pass down her toys. I wanted to raise girls. I know girls. I’ve studied girls. I grew up a girl.

But then came the ultrasound results, when we opened up the sealed envelope to view the images and find out the sex of our unborn baby. There was the head and profile of a perfect face. There were the tiny feet. There was a fist. And there, on that final image was an arrow pointing to a tiny penis with the caption, “I’m a boy.”

Disappointed is not the right word here. This was my child and he was healthy and perfectly formed and growing rapidly inside of me. I was not disappointed to find out I was having a boy, but I was taken aback. “What am I going to do with a boy?” was all I could think as the news set in.

I’ve always imagined myself as a mother of girls. I had a girl first. I wished for a girl and was thrilled to find out our first child was a girl. Raising her has been the delight of my life. She is feisty and funny and smart and beautiful. When I imagined what my second child would be like, I couldn’t help but imagine a copy of my first child. She was all I knew and my love for her was all consuming.

I am not a “girly girl” and didn’t wish for a girl so I could cover her in pink ruffles and dress her up as a princess. I had (and have) all intentions of raising a strong and independent girl. One who knows who she is and what she wants. If that happens to be pink ruffles and princesses, so be it. I don’t necessarily want a tomboy either. But if she happens to love being outdoors and riding bikes over dress-up and playing with dolls, that’s fine with me, too. I want her to be who she wants to be.

That’s part of what I have studied for many years – helping girls discover and be who they really are and who they want to be. I’ll admit, my studies have been pretty one-sided. I studied girls partially because I needed to work on myself and heal from my life growing up as a girl. Boys were never a focus of my studies, not really on my radar, even. It was important to me to learn about girls for my own transformation and for girls of present and future generations. As I worked and wrote and studied, I hoped that someday I’d have a girl or girls of my own to raise and to whom I could pass down all I had learned.

And this brings me back to that ultrasound photo and those words, “I’m a boy.” Reading that, I was excited for the new adventures a boy would bring, but I also felt a bit of dread. Again, I thought, “what am I going to do with a boy?” I don’t know enough about boys to raise one. I don’t know what it’s like to be a boy. I don’t know what they like, how they think, what drives them, and how to read them.

Months of apprehension awaited me as I prepared to welcome a boy into my world. I was honestly afraid. A boy was a new animal to me, something unexpected, something unknown. I had gotten used to life with my husband but a baby boy whose life depended on my care was something altogether frightening.

I remember thinking, even up to the morning of my c-section that the ultrasound could be wrong and that maybe we’d have a girl instead. It wasn’t as if I didn’t want the baby inside me – whatever it was, boy or girl. I just leaned more toward girl and had a hard time accepting the fact that soon this boy would be a part of my life.

And then he was born. Strapped down, numbed, and dazed on the operating table, I looked up above the blue sheet concealing my cut-open abdomen and I saw him. All of a sudden this boy who had been aggressively kicking inside of me, wreaking havoc on my body, and already turning my world upside down was here. And he was mine.

In the brief moment that I was able to see him before they took him away to get cleaned up, weighed and measured, I fell in love. His cries from across the room pulled at my heart. I tried to listen as the nurse filled my husband in on his vitals, weight, and length. My son, a healthy 9lbs. 4oz and 21.5 inches long was here and his gender no longer mattered.

The first time I was able to hold him, I placed his bare skin up to my chest and felt him curl up into me, where he belonged. This was my child, my son. Wishes and college studies and ideas of how things should be disappeared completely. Girl or boy, it didn’t matter. What mattered was this healthy, beautiful baby curled up on my chest. This baby who needed me as much as I needed him.