It's a Boy

Although the rational part of me knew that statistically there was pretty much a 50 percent chance of having a baby of either sex, the superstitious part of me believed that, while baby girls were of course born naturally of their mothers, baby boys required work. In the tradition of old wives' tales, you had to do something difficult and deliberate to conceive them—it involved an esoteric kind of meditation, maybe, or an unusual physical technique, perhaps, or both. Obviously, female had to be the "default" sex. Look at Henry VIII. Look at all those millions of Chinese people, casting aside all those unwanted baby girls in the streets. Some part of me must have had the smug, secret notion that I would be cosmically rewarded for valuing what so many others on the planet had historically devalued. It seemed clear. Because I wanted a girl, I would get her.

My fixation on the sex of the baby was ridiculous, I knew. I'd had four miscarriages prior to this pregnancy; I should have been overjoyed and grateful to have finally achieved a healthy, viable pregnancy at all. And I was. Oh, I always was. At least, the logical, rational part of me always was. I have to admit, though, that for a few days after that ultrasound, I reeled.

In the car, on the way home from the fetal assessment clinic, I tried to explain—ostensibly to my husband—why I was so disappointed. "I feel like I'd know what to do with a girl," I told him. "I know how it feels to be a girl. I'd be able to help her through the tricky stuff. I don't know anything about boys and their tricky stuff."

"Oh, boys don't have any tricky stuff," said David, trying to be reassuring. He laughed. "They're really easy. Once they hit puberty, all they think about is sex. They don't care about anything else. And that's pretty much it, until they die."

I was not reassured.

Over the next few days, guiltily flailing around for another explanation for my distress over having a boy, I turned—in the time-honored way—to blaming my mother. On a number of occasions, my mother had told me that, while I'd never given her more than a moment's trouble, my little brother had been so demanding that if he'd been born first, he'd have been an only child. My mother was also fond of telling me about playground studies on sex differences in toddlers. "Little girls spend their time talking to each other about relationships," she'd told me on the phone. "Little boys run around making weird noises."

According to my mother, all men were difficult—but the men in my immediate family were notoriously difficult. Having had firsthand experience with those difficult men, I wholeheartedly agreed with her. Perversely, though, I figured this was somehow my mother's fault. I had the vague notion that it had something to do with the way she'd handled them.

Although my mother was very open with me about how difficult my little brother had been to raise, I'd secretly continued to nurse a childhood grudge against her based on my belief that, in spite of how difficult he was—or maybe because of it—she'd always preferred him to me. Even today my childhood friends marvel over how he'd had her wrapped around his little finger—though, to be fair, he'd had almost everyone wrapped around his little finger. Where I was dough faced, obedient, and sullen, he was cherubic, mischievous, and charming—and that difference between us may explain the way my mom seemed to light up around him. Because when I tried to think of examples of times she had favored him over me specifically because he was a boy, I couldn't think of many. Sure, now and then she'd make me do the dishes while he was sent outside to play; she'd insisted that was because I was older, not because I was a girl. Sure, there was a time when she spent the two hours before bed reading and playing alone with him every evening. When I asked why we couldn't have a similar private time together, she explained he was a little behind in school and that I did so well because I'd already gotten four years alone with her before he'd been born. So, while there were signs like these, open to interpretation, I couldn't come to any definite conclusions.

Still, I remembered my little brother eternally getting into some kind of trouble and my mother fretting over it. When he was five or six, he disappeared repeatedly on his way home from kindergarten—distracted by other children, he'd stop to play with them and forget to come home. My mother and I would drive around our small town looking for him for hours. Mom would shout his name frantically out the open windows of the family car the entire time. Now and then, I'd join in and call out dutifully. When he was a young teen, he and a couple of friends went camping and accidentally started a raging forest fire. When he was sixteen or seventeen, he got kicked out of private school for having sex with his girlfriend on the stage in the auditorium. In his early twenties, he dropped out of college and refused to get a job. All of this made my mother sick with worry. I suppose I equated "sick with worry" with "love."

But while I could remember the permanent anxious expression on my mother's face, her migraine headaches and her constantly wringing hands, I couldn't remember my brother's being made to suffer any consequences for his actions. I also remembered his asking for things—asking to do things, asking to have things—and getting them. They were things I would never have asked for, because I had assumed the answer would be "no." Because I had felt the answer should be "no."

Was my little brother difficult, as my mother had always maintained, because he was a boy? Was he difficult, as I'd always secretly believed, because of the way my mother had handled him, because of the way I felt she'd spoiled and coddled him? Or was he difficult simply because . . . he was difficult? It was easy to assume that my little brother's behavior and preferential treatment were due to his maleness. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it was possible that it had as much to do with his own particular temperament as it did with his sex—or his environment.

With my own baby boy still curled safely inside my belly, all I could conclude was that if I happened to have a willful, headstrong son, I would certainly try to handle it differently than my mother had. I'd be firmer. I'd say "no." Just because he had a Y chromosome, it didn't necessarily follow that my son was destined to be difficult, too.

In his midthirties, my father had become born again in our dim living room, on his knees in front of a flickering television evangelist. Soon afterward, instead of finding an established church to join, he took up with a cultlike fundamentalist Christian group that met in another living room—the living room of a local farming family who seemed to have modeled themselves on the Amish. Although even I, at the age of ten or twelve, could see that the central, most powerful figure in the group was the farmer's wife, the sect subscribed to extremely sexist views, even more sexist than those already inculcated in my dad through his years of Catholic school in the 1950s. As a result, we were often treated to litanies, at the dining room table or during the interminable Bible studies my father made us sit through, on the subservient role of women.

According to my father, a woman had one role in life and one role only—to create a safe and comfortable home for her family, one in which she could look after her husband and raise her children. A man, on the other hand, was free to do whatever he wished in the world, as long as it in some way provided financially for his family. And so, in combination with his extreme religious zealotry, my father was also a bit of a Willy Loman figure. Constantly trying to figure out a way to get rich quick and support us in the style to which his God had made him accustomed, he moved haphazardly from Amway to ill-fated real estate deals to various questionable multilevel marketing schemes.

My dad was—and still is—tall and good-looking, fond of hearing himself talk. He could be outrageously charming, gregarious, and enthusiastic. Sometimes he was self-confident to the point of complete self-centeredness, even self-indulgence. At other times he was deeply insecure—to the point of complete self-centeredness and self-indulgence. He was also prone to sudden inexplicable spells of rage or depression, which were terrifying to us, as children, in their unpredictability. In short, my father was what some people would call "an interesting character"—while others might say he was "clinically insane." I love him dearly, but I belong to the latter group (and maybe in more ways than one, it occurs to me now). However, as I tried to trace my reluctance to give birth to a boy to my relationship with my father, I began to understand (and this may seem counterintuitive) that because I'd thought of my father as an aberration for quite some time—in no way is he your "normal," "average" guy—I couldn't honestly say that I'd come to many conclusions about the male sex in general based on his example.Yes, he'd made me aware of the sexist views many men hold about women. And yes, at times I'd privately countered those views by coming up with unflattering generalizations about the male sex in turn—men were inherently violent, men were inherently more selfish and less sensitive, men were fixated on sex—but my heart had never been in it.

If that seems slightly insane and more than slightly controlling, well, that's because it is.

Once that realization hit, I realized this: My fantasies about my imaginary daughter were similarly, if not more, insane and controlling. I began to see that they were linked to an earlier fantasy of mine: the "doing it all over again" fantasy, which had started back when I was in high school. This fantasy involved being reborn as an infant, but with all the knowledge and experience I'd acquired up to that point. I was sure that, given such an opportunity, I could get my life "right" a second time through. Over the years, though, the more I entertained this fantasy, the more it began to take a slightly nightmarish turn. Trying—and failing bleakly—to imagine, for instance, how the new, improved me would handle a notorious fifth-grade bully any differently than the way I had already (i.e., by making myself the fifth-grade equivalent of invisible), I'd think, Who am I kidding? I'll still be the same person, constructed out of exactly the same genetic material. What if I can't do any better than I've already done? Worse—what if I screw up even more?