In my early years of courtship and then marriage to my former husband, I’d often retell the story of my fabled first encounter with his mother. He’d taken me to his childhood home for the long-awaited meet-the-parents dinner, and we sat around after the meal sipping our waters and staring nervously at one another.
We had exhausted the basics of my upbringing and I was rooting around in my brain for ways to keep the conversation flowing. “So,” I said to his mom, my mouth in too wide, too earnest of a smile, “You have four boys! Did you feel sad that you didn’t have a daughter?”
I cringe to remember this question, one that was clearly spilling out of a naive mouth. I was 21 years old at the time, deep into my graduate work and not even yet certain if I wanted children of my own.
Unfazed, which perhaps is the only way to have survived raising four sons, this woman looked me dead in the eyes and replied, “No. I never wanted a daughter. Not at all.”
The man who would become my husband was holding my hand at the time, and I could feel my nails dig into his poor skin as I gripped his hand tighter. I let out a laugh that was almost a snort and then reached for my water glass to take a large gulp.
She went on, a small smile forming on her lips, “Girls, no. But I wanted a whole baseball team full of boys.”
As I said, this couple sentence exchange would become part of my brand of mother-in-law lore. I immediately repeated it to my girlfriends and parents as evidence of the mountain I’d need to climb to get close to her, as she clearly was telling me in no uncertain terms that there was no space in her heart for a daughter – for me. She wasn’t one of those moms of boys who longed for the day that they’d bring home their sweet better halves. She clearly hadn’t fantasized about shopping adventures and girls trips with a daughter-in-law. The way I’d heard it, she was very content in her testosterone-soaked home. No girls allowed.
Of course, this wasn’t what she had said to me that day, only my anxious interpretation. I’d been enrolled in my personality assessment class at the time, and just like the Rorschach tests I’d been studying for months, I projected exactly what I was fearing onto her.
This woman would soon enough become my mother-in-law and later would become one of the most dear people in my life, in large part because of the affection and care she showed me as I became a mom to a brood of boys myself.
I would later think about why her response to my question that day felt so jarring. I’d still contend that there was a pointedness to it, but I realize now that it was really because it felt so wildly implausible to me that she could have been telling the truth. The idea that she could have actually not wanted daughters? Well, that was so far outside of my realm of reality that I could only interpret her response to be about me, the potential daughter sitting in front of her.
Boys could be cute and loyal, sure, but everyone who wanted kids wanted a daughter, I had imagined. How could someone want to have a house full of boys? I knew how you could end up there, obviously, but dreaming of a home filled with muddy shoes and constant noise and the pungent smells… It seemed so foreign to me, particularly as I looked out from my self-focused, intellectual life at the time. How could you survive such a messy, loud, chaotic existence?
I would soon find out.
–
Many years later, my belly swelled with my third child and I found myself on the receiving end of plenty of amused stares. As I walked around the grocery store and the park, strangers would take in the scene of my pregnant womb and the two little boys at my side and offer some variation of what became the tiredest of remarks. “I bet you’re hoping that’s one’s a girl!”
My chest would redden as I forced myself to grin back and hurry on, hurrying of course being a relative term given my waddle and the need to be constantly removing grasping hands from cereal boxes. I’d feel some sort of indignant annoyance at their comments, their assumptions. They seemed to imply that the two little humans by my side were somehow not quite what I wanted. Or that my life must be a hot mess of boogers and broken furniture, and that I simply must dream of a version of them that was slightly more regulated and, even, demure.
My righteousness at the gender stereotypes implied in their comments was only a thin veil for the reality underneath. I hated admitting it, most of all to myself, but these strangers were spot on. I longed for a little girl.
In fact, in my closest circles, I considered it my act of radical transparency to acknowledge my hope that this one would be a girl. What I didn’t reveal was the depth of my hope. I framed it as a wish, but was careful to reinforce that I wouldn’t be heartbroken, trying to strike that cool balance of vulnerability and casualness. We had decided to not find out the sex of this baby, just as we had done with my two older children, and while I took it as evidence of my okay-ness with whatever the outcome, it may have actually been a desire to forestall the knowing.
In the end, I’m not sure I could have known how the grief of this third boy would hit me until his maleness was finally known at his birth. For better or worse, there was no time for the weight of the grief to hit, however, because his birth turned into a frightening medical emergency that eclipsed everything else. By the time it was over, I was so grateful to be alive and coming home that I might have been elated to raise a parakeet. His precious demeanor also didn’t hurt, and I fell, once again quickly in love.
–
I started reading Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom recently, a book that I initially resisted when I saw it circulating online before its publication. I’d had no idea what it was actually about, but the title was a phrase I’d spent so many years internally rallying against that I could only imagine it would make me cringe in the way the Facebook posts and t-shirts with the term did. But when I read an interview with the author a couple months back, I ordered the book before I’d gotten to the end of the piece.
In the book’s introduction, Whippman addressed the “boymom” phrase head-on, articulating her own uneasiness with the term in a way that left me saying, “Yes!” out loud. A mom of three boys herself, she astutely named the way she saw women online proclaiming their #boymom pride in a way that felt like trying a little too hard. It was as if us moms of boys were so aware of the pity the world has for us that we feel the need to reject it outright. That’s not to say there weren’t people like my mother-in-law who genuinely dreamed of a brood of boys. But the reality is that our modern, western culture seems to prefer girls as children.
As soon as I write that last sentence, my feminist heart won’t let me move on without the disclaimer that this by no means indicates that patriarchy or misogyny is resolved. We are seeming eons from this reality, if our politicians’ accepted behavior and the data on just about everything from sexual harassment to pay inequity are any indication. It would be easy to say our more modern preference for girls is a function of generational shifts. That would be true, but I wonder if what’s also true is something more stomach-turning: we love little girls, but we seem to hate the women they become.
Whippman references New York Times articles in her book that name the shift from parents longing for boys to longing for girls. I went and looked up the articles she mentioned, and stumbled upon another in the archives. This one highlighted an economic study that seemed to demonstrate the shift. Instead of simply asking parents which they preferred – a useful tactic, but also, behaviors speak much louder than words – these researchers looked at when people stopped trying to have more children. They were more likely to stop having children after having a girl. Further, the adoption and fertility literature, where parents could, at times, name gender preferences, indicated a preference for girls.
I felt this reality in a lived experience kind of way. I felt my own gender grief, as it’s come to be known, as well as the weight of the world’s empathic glances at my family composition.
Early on, I found myself curious if the loss I felt at the opportunity to raise a girl was some kind of universal experience for moms of only boys, or if I was privy to some special kind of sadness as someone who’d built an identity and career as a feminist. I suspected it was a bit of both. In what now feels embarrassingly self-centered to admit, I imagined my fate as a feminist with a bunch of sons as some kind of cosmic test, the universe chuckling at me while lovingly ushering in my big lessons.
I took the test so literally that shortly after the birth of my third son, I registered a domain name and started designing a website focused on raising feminist sons. I generated a post or two before succumbing to the actual reality of raising three tiny boys, with the requisite clean-up, cuddling, and constant snacks. Once I started back to work and got into the rhythm of my own feminist parenting, dreams of this platform dissipated. Or at least they mostly did. I kept paying for the domain for five more years, just in case.
As I look back, maybe what I was doing early on was my version of exactly what Whippman described in the #boymom culture: unconsciously protesting my fate by immersing myself in it.
–
As I’ve continued to read Whippman’s BoyMom, the part that’s resonated most deeply for me so far is how she describes her struggle against the idea that a baby’s sex or a child’s gender should matter at all. Whippman was raised by a hardline feminist mother who railed against the idea of difference between sexes. Just like my own mom, and perhaps the culture writ large for progressives Baby Boomer and Gen Z parents, their denial of difference often manifested as the denial of the value of the feminine. You can do anything boys can do, they told us clearly. But what if we didn’t want to?
Prior to having my own children, again like Whippman, I would have said that the way children’s preferences seemed to divide on gender lines was entirely a construction of our culture. With a hubris I was totally unaware of, I vowed that my own parenting would be totally devoid of these biases. It was one of the reasons I didn’t find out the sex of my babies. I didn’t want to start gendering them before I’d even met them earthside. This lack of information would ensure that I filled their rooms and bookshelves with the most neutral of stimuli. And with all that practice relating to my unborn baby beyond gender, I’d surely be able to continue that into their childhood, right?
And then, of course, came my parade of little boys, followed a bit later by the surprise of a little girl to hold up the rear. While I was elated to learn of my last baby’s arrival, I was also aware of the optics. Of course you tried for your girl, they would think. Little did they know that she was a shock to us all, the unplanned baby after three IVF babies. But back to the parade…
When those little boys came marching into my life, I suddenly had to question everything I’d be touting about gender. They were non-stop. They were destructive. They were constantly using their physical bodies to aggress against other physical bodies. At first I didn’t know if my experience with these rambunctious, dysregulated beings was unique to their sex, or if it actually just reflected extremely poor parenting on my part. To be honest, I’m still not sure most days.
But the reality was that my experience of parenting them felt different than the experience I saw reflected in my friends with girls. Maybe it was the additive effect of multiple boys, but my home quickly became somewhere that felt dizzying. Watching my friend’s little girls gently place stickers in a book or engage in cooperative play stirred up both an envy and shame I didn’t know possible.
And there was something else that I noticed, something I’ve only more recently been able to put into words. As my sons started to grow, their limbs stretching out and their muscles stronger, their voices carrying farther through the house and their destructiveness intensifying, I started to feel scared. Not of them, exactly, but because of them. The reality is that as girls and then women, our bodies learn to be on high alert in the presence of unruly boys and men. While I’m not fearful of my own children, per se, I noticed how my body’s threat responses would get activated. They wrestle around the living room floor, pulling cushions off couches, yelling like banshees, and I am transported to a college fraternity house. I feel small, vulnerable, needing to get out of the way.
I’m trying, of course, to build respect in my boys – respect for bodies, their home environment, and my HomeGoods throw blankets – but the task can feel Herculean, like trying to dam the ocean. And that helplessness triggers something in me at times, a frustration and rage that feels like generations of the ancestral women inside of me wanting to scream, “Can you just calm down and be quiet for one damn minute!?”
I didn’t want gender to be part of the equation in my parenting. But as I’m learning, and as Whippman’s book brilliantly illuminates, pretending it’s not is only doing a disservice to my sons, and to me as their mother.
–
I now feel compelled to share with you a few adorable anecdotes of my three beautiful boys. Like the way my oldest checked in on me the other day while I was sweeping up some mess or another, probing me further when I said I was fine, telling me he could tell I wasn’t. Or how my middle son, now 9, and I have the most fascinating conversations about politics and social justice. Or how my youngest has a habit of never letting go when he hugs me. We could stay locked in our embrace for days, I’m certain.
I want you to know how brilliantly complex these boys are, because that’s equally the truth of who they are. They are rowdy and irreverent, and they are deeply sensitive and thoughtful. They are, just as we have been telling girls for the last generation, so much more than we have pegged them for.
I’m grateful for books like Whippman’s and it makes me aware of how much these conversations have been missing. I didn’t exactly want to be a #boymom, but here I am: sweaty, bruised, and deeply in love.
