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Is It Sad When You Want a Girl But Have a Boy?
Maybe it’s because I have two daughters, or because my parents, who came from pretty girl-heavy families, had two daughters. Or maybe it’s because cultural preferences for one sex (historically male, of course) have always gotten on my nerves. I don’t know why, exactly, but I have a hard time sympathizing with women who pine for daughters.
I mean, I get that there were dreams as kids about all kinds of things, but dreams were made to be dashed or broken or something. So even though Rachel Coyne quite nicely lays out her own long history of daughter-wanting, I just can’t feel her pain.
In her piece, “The Universe Owes Me a Daughter,” Coyne writes in Open Salon:
As a parent, I’m not sure how to reconcile my deep wish that the boys bond through playing together and the reality that every game they invent is violent. Injuries are rare, however, and never more than a bump to the ground. But I can’t help thinking that if my sons were girls they would be wearing the fairy wings I saw today in a catalog and pretending to fly.
It’s that argument — the cute, sweet, head-in-the-clouds fantasy — that gets my skin crawling. I feel like I have to set the record straight on behalf of little girls everywhere: they’re brutal. And I don’t mean in the “they’ll break their daddy’s heart someday” (ugh!). I mean, little girls are little kids and damn, little kids can be mean. Coyne writes of weaponry fashioned from and old umbrella and a broken fishing pole. I’ll meet her fishing pole and up the ante with a brick. Oh, and a bruising pinch plus and ear-piercing scream.
My sister and I both still bear the scars of pre-seatbelt knock-down, drag-out fights that took place in the sizable backseat of the family Buick Skylark. My own daughters get routinely scrappy during the daily 4 p.m. blood sugar dive and, hell, they scare me!
Girls may be more fun to dress and, indeed, the clothes are better (I also have a son, so I feel like I’m allowed to say that). But ponies and rainbows and scratchy little tutus are dumped on girls. Those things are just a distraction and, frankly, eye candy for the adults in the room. Little girls aren’t afraid to go all Lord of the Flies, if we’d give them access to the hall closet and a tackle box. Little girls are more than willing to kick the crap out of each other. They just do it in cuter shoes.
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20 Comments
[...] Is it Sad to Have a Boy When you Want a Girl? [...]
OB Group Now Encouraging VBAC | Strollerderby commented on Jul 22 10 at 9:28 amMistress_Scorpio commented on Jul 21 10 at 6:39 pm“little girls aren’t afraid to go all Lord of the Flies” – that was awesome…
I knew a family ones that had six boys and finally got the girl the mom wanted. The dad was a friend and he threw a party to celebrate his impending vasectomy.
Laure68 commented on Jul 21 10 at 7:01 pmI know I shouldn’t judge other people’s feelings, and I am going to sound like a total b@#$@, but when reading this I wished I could take the author and slap her. It is actually a good thing she didn’t have a girl. She had such a specific idea of what this girl would be like I can’t imagine the disappointment she would feel when she realize her daughter would not be exactly how she pictured, and how she would constantly try to make her daughter fit this ideal of hers.
TC commented on Jul 21 10 at 7:23 pmI agree Laure68. My daughter is her own person and she’s very definite about that. She plays with dinosaurs while wearing her Princess dress (that she chose to put on). She wants her blue nail polish on her toes and sports a Spiderman bandaid on her knees (from climbing). She’s got her own style and her own voice. I agree the author would have struggled with that had she been blessed with a girl.
alison commented on Jul 21 10 at 8:21 pmThe title of her article says it all. I really want to sit the author down and say, “No, Princess, the Universe doesn’t owe you anything and maybe you should have some sympathy for all the people who just wish to have a child of either gender before speak such drivel about fairy wings.”
PlumbLucky commented on Jul 21 10 at 9:40 pmI have no such delusions…and I am scared that this child could be a girl. Know why? I figure I will either have a daughter who is a young me (this scares husby, we’ve known each other since we were in our early teens, no, we have NOT been together that long) OR the complete opposite. The former scares me, the latter confounds me.
I guess the author of the article is entitled to her opinion…but hey, I don’t have to agree with her.
LogicalMama commented on Jul 21 10 at 10:28 pmFirst of all this reminds me of the Malcolm in the Middle episode where the mom daydreams of all the boys being girls. In the end, the whole fantasy implodes!
Voice of Reason commented on Jul 21 10 at 11:32 pmUghh, it gets on my nerves too. We all go into this thing knowing that there’s a 50% chance we’ll have a boy/girl, so it’s ridiculous to obsess about having one over the other. There’s no guarantee our girls will be girly or our boys will be macho and who gives a crap, anyway? I, for one, am doing my best to raise individuals, not gender stereotypes.
JBoogie commented on Jul 22 10 at 6:44 amI was a little bit secretly happy when I realized I was having a boy because I know what my sister and I did to my mother and I am a firm believer in karma. I will be royally screwed if I ever have a girl, haha. You are right, we are brutal.
Marj commented on Jul 22 10 at 10:12 amI’m glad I had boys because I can’t do hair. Not even my own. Also, I dislike pink. Why? Because I was the only girl (two brothers) and my mom dressed me in pink, decked out my room in pink and made me a bunch of pink stuff.
The only time I feel a twinge is walking by the little girl’s section of clothes. They’re way better than when I was a kid. If they made some of that in my size, I’d go for it. Fun and whimsical? Check!
Shannon Cate commented on Jul 22 10 at 10:18 amMy younger daughter–the one who wants to wear a “pwetty dwess” every day no matter WHAT, is the roughest, tumblinest kid you ever saw. Just yesterday she scrapped herself up to the monkey bars (that she can’t reach), pwetty dwess and all, tried desperately to swing her body out to catch a bar and dropped four feet to the ground getting woodchips stuck to her face.
She looked up, laughed, and tried again.
Repeat X 3.
Newby commented on Jul 22 10 at 12:56 pmMy pre-schooler son wears a tutu while he plays with dinosaurs. My toddler daughter has a shoe obsession but also has an obsession with matchbox cars, the garbage truck and covering herself in mud and sand at every turn. When someone blows up our garage in 10 years, I’m making no assumptions about which kid did it.
Newby commented on Jul 22 10 at 12:57 pmAnd, quite frankly, I think boy clothes are cuter. Girl clothes are all so boring a pink.
Snarky Mama commented on Jul 22 10 at 1:14 pmI’ll admit, for a long time I thought I wanted a girl. I had visions of dresses, aprons and baking cookies, sewing projects, cute shoes…and by the time I was pregnant with my 3rd, I even had visions of pink.
Then I looked around and realized, hey, my oldest does needlepoint, my middle likes to cook, all kids trash their clothes (no matter how cute), and if my 3rd was a girl, she’d probably be a tomboy anyway.
I realize I was just so enamored of the clothes, not of girls, per se. Now I fulfill my jones for buying cute girl stuff for my friends’ kids. And the more the parents-to-be exclaim, “My daughter will never wear pink!” (usually the first-timers), the frillier the clothes I buy them.
Suzer2 commented on Jul 22 10 at 2:10 pmI have 4 boys, ages 19, 17, 14 and 16 months. The 16 month old was our attempt at a girl. Ha! I love my boys to death, but I was hoping for a girl for different reasons. I detest the princess, barbie, ribbon culture. I wanted a girl for the relationship in the future. As I have seen my older boys grow, I have paid close attention to the relationships other men have with their mothers, and more heartbreakingly, the relationships their wives have with their mothers-in-law. I know that some day soon, I will probably become a pain in my sons’ wives’ asses, no matter how nice I try to be. All too often I have seen men distance themselves from their mothers as adults to avoid conflict with their wives. Although I have had my ups and downs with my mom, I still have a strong bond with her. I was hoping for a girl so that I could experience the weddings of my children and the birth of my grandchildren without being viewed as an outsider. I know some women have great relationships with their mother in laws, but that seems to be the exception, not the rule. Hopefully I can stay close with my boys throughout their lives, but it would have been nice to have a girl to have a different type of relationship to look forward to.
bob commented on Jul 22 10 at 2:41 pmMy wife feels much like you do, Suzer2. I’m surprised it took this much discussion for someone to express that motivation.
Amy commented on Jul 22 10 at 4:01 pmCan’t we just be happy to have healthy children! We wanted a girl..got a boy…oh well..he is awesome and happy!
Robyn commented on Jul 23 10 at 2:46 amIf the author feels that the universe owes her a girl, there are plenty all over the world whom she could adopt. We have a boy, and now we are adopting a girl. Easy? No. But we get what we want.
My boy loves to play princess and cars. He has tiaras and tutus, takes soccer and ballet. He’s a very well-rounded little man.
Alicia commented on Jul 27 10 at 11:15 amSuzer2: You have to remember that not all daughters get along with their own mothers. Having a girl is never a guarantee that your relationship with her will be a good one. I have an almost non-existent relationship with my mother. She hardly ever sees her grandson. So having a girl does *not* equal a good relationship. Having a girl simply means having a girl.
This article touches on something that drives me nuts, a phenomenon called “Gender Disappointment”. There are women out there that claim to have this “disorder” because they have children the opposite gender of what they want, and they moan and groan about it all the time. Some even allow it to affect their relationship with their existing children. There’s a big group of them at a popular parenting website that just feed on each other. They’re typically not concerned about whether their pregnancy is a healthy one, they focus solely on finding out the gender. It’s sickening.
Sweetpea commented on Dec 13 11 at 1:27 pmI have two boys and still yearn for a daughter. Not that I don’t love my sons. I do, and they are fine, handsome, strapping boys. But I was told my first was a girl in the ultrasound, and found out later otherwise. It was like my daughter had died. Granted, the boy in question is only three years old, but still. After my second born was also a boy, I finaly threw in the towel and sold all the little girl things Ihad collected.
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