original image via Wikimedia Commons
Previous Loco Parentis columns can be found here.
I’m currently pregnant with my second child and I thought I’d heard every pregnancy comment and fielded every pregnancy question that existed. But I was wrong. This will be our last baby and when people learn that, they sometimes say something like, “I hope it’s a girl.”
We don’t actually know the sex of this baby yet, but my first child is a son. He’s healthy and perfect, a dreamy, easy-going toddler. But people seem to think that without a girl my family would be incomplete. Their level of concern suggests that I’d be missing something big and important, something I really, really don’t want to miss.
When they say this, I don’t know how to respond. It’s not usually phrased as a question, so no answer is necessary. If it was, how would I respond? Do I want a girl? Yes. I do. But it’s more complicated than that.
The truth is, I want all my possible children. I want a daughter, yes. But I also want a little brother for my son. I want the version of my child that plays piano like my mother and guitar like my husband.
I want the child that has my father’s wit and my grandfather’s artistic eye. I want the son who will become a writer. The daughter who will be an airline pilot. I want the one who will have five children and bring them to our house for Thanksgiving every year. I want the one who moves away and sends us postcards from places we’ve never been.
I want one with her father’s sense of direction and one who’s always lost, like me. I know they’re all out there, living in the hypothetical multiverse of potential genetic recombinance. My sons. My daughters. I want them all.
For me, it doesn’t break down so smoothly along gender lines. I don’t think there are just two kinds of kid and that once you have one of each you somehow “have it all.” I think the variations are endless and that they really don’t have much to do with gender at all. Would it be sad not to have a daughter? Sure. But no sadder than not having a child who likes Star Trek or shares my passion for cheesecake or reads or rollerblades or plays ping pong on the weekends. Every possibility seems amazing.
Of course, I’ll be okay with just one more happy, healthy child. Whoever he or she is, that will be enough. But in my fantasy, I would live in all possible worlds. I would know them all. I would stroke their curly hair, their straight hair, their brown hair, their red hair. I’d touch their freckles and scars. They’d be tall and short and thin and thick. They’d be funny and charming and athletic and sensitive and careful and careless and carefree.
There would be so many, I couldn’t possibly name them all, but I’d love them anyway. Sometimes I can feel them, already living inside my heart. It makes me sad to know that most of them are children I’ll never get to meet.
But I am grateful for the opportunity to meet this one more. And whether it’s a girl or a boy doesn’t matter. It’s mine. And I already can’t wait to find out who it is.
Tags: aubrey hirsch, loco parentis, the butter
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Lovely.
This is insanely beautiful.
Beat me to those exact words. Wow.
Oh my.
This is basically the definition of short and sweet. Loved this.
This sums up how I feel about my beloved Mini Siniichulok exactly! I had gender disappointment when I was pregnant with him (though it was due to fear of not parenting a boy as well/Issues from growing up in my family-of-origin/untreated prenatal depression). Both before and after I got over it,it really irked and surprised me that people would just open their mouths and free-associate the most filterless things about what sex they thought the baby would be or what they thought of his sex once it was known. (“You look like you’re having a boy, because you look great and girls steal your beauty. You look like you’re having a boy, because mothers of girls are more beautiful. Oh, you’re having a boy? Girls are better. They have to take care of you in your old age. Boys replace you with their wives. Girls will be your confidantes.” Just, ew. Ew to all of that.) Having a boy–and having a boy who shows signs of liking sports (I was always terrified of sports) at 19 months–made me realize that gender really doesn’t matter. We were just bouncing balls on the ceiling together and laughing, which made me realize that actually, bouncing balls is pretty rad. Activities don’t matter and are not gendered in and of themselves. Whatever these little individuals are drawn to and interested in, and however they act, it’s part of them and infinitely fascinating.
“girls steal your beauty”
“boys will replace you with their wives”
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
I kind of hope at some point an also-pregnant person says this to me so I can respond “Well, yours must be a girl then. . .”
“Whatever these little individuals are drawn to and interested in, and however they act, it’s part of them and infinitely fascinating.”
This is extremely well put. Infinitely fascinating – that sums up my experience as a parent just so well.
This is so, so lovely. Thank you for putting words to something I’ve felt for a long time. Spouse does not particularly want children; I recognize that there are many excellent reasons for us not to procreate, but there are twinges and I can’t quite get hir to understand why. You’ve helped me articulate what I really find myself yearning for every time I hold a baby. I am thinking about our potential child, whom I’m not likely to meet.
This is something I think about a lot now that my friends’ and relatives’ second and third children are growing up and showing their personalities. So true and beautiful.
My jaw has never literally dropped before. This was jaw droppingly perfect. So precise. Really amazing. I read it twice
This is making me all sorts of sad. I lost a pregnancy at 19 weeks in between having my two girls. The one I lost would have been a boy. I think sometimes about what he would have been like. Not so much what would having a son have been like but like this. What would he have been like as a person. Of course if we had had him then my younger daughter would not have been born as we always just wanted two. I can’t even imagine not having her now.
I’m so sorry you lost your baby. I hope you got lots of love and support through your grief. And I hope people listen to you when you talk about your pain. Take Care.
Thanks so much. This happened 8 years ago so the pain is mostly gone but I do still think about what he might have been like.
This is a great post. I think the comments you describe are a consequence of people seeing the gender binary as bigger than differences between individuals. Sure, there are some aspects of raising a (cisgender) girl that are really different from raising a (cisgender) boy (that girl will never have her first wet dream, that boy never his first period), but overall? I have both a brother and a sister, and between us, my brother and I are much more alike than either of us is like my sister.
and also the child may be transgender, and/or nonbinary! raising a cis girl is different from raising a trans girl, raising an athletic girl is different from raising a quiet bookish girl. not only are “boy” and “girl” unnecessarily polarizing categories, so are “(cis) boy” and “(cis) girl”!
That’s why I specified cisgender – even if you’re assuming that your child will be cisgender, that’s no real predictor of what raising him or her will be like. But of course you never know whether your child will indeed be cis!
This is completely beautiful. For me, one thing about being pregnant with a second kid rather than a first is the realization that I’m pregnant with a person. With my first, I was so focused on having “a baby” that I thought only a little about who she would be. Now I think about how this one will be born with her own temperament and preferences, how she’ll interact with her sister and how the two of them will shape each other. It’s almost more mind-blowing, in a way.
I’m blown away that individuals think babies will be genders, not people. Have these individuals never encountered siblings of the same gender who are completely different? My nieces are only 10.5 months apart, but they are so different that it’s weird to refer to them as “the girls,” like most do.
This was lovely; I feel the same way, and you nearly made me cry at work. I love my daughter and I’m so excited to see who she is going to be. She’s nearly 10 months old, so we only have glimmers of her personality so far, but she is certainly an individual. We are planning to try for a second in the next few months, and I’ve heard some of the same thing about having a boy next, but I’m just excited to see who shows up.
“I want the one who moves away and sends us postcards from places we’ve never been.”
I know it wasn’t the point of the post, but when I read that there were actually tears in my eyes – I only ever hear about how heartbreaking it is that I am not always near my family, how I must not love them, and it just hit me right in the feels to hear someone say they’d want a child like me.
You’re a glorious human, thank you, good night
Aww, thank you for writing this! I’m currently pregnant and we’re not planning to find out the sex until birth. People keep asking me/my husband what we’re having/what we want, and it feels like everything has so much expectation attached to it. I don’t know and I don’t want to know yet who our baby is. It’s just our baby right now.
I did not find out with my daughters until they were born. Both times my bother said I was having a “Schrödinger’s baby”. The baby was both male and female until birth.
In reply to all questions regarding “do you know what you’re having?” My most excellent neighbors would always look deeply thoughtful and ever-so-slightly worried and say “We’re pretty sure we’re having a baby?” Which tended to divide the questioners into those who laughed appreciatively and those who chose to be offended and sputter. It was great.
We did that! Even though we knew what the gender was. We’d look at each other quizzically and say, “honey, back me up here…I think…it’s a baby, right? Is that what the doctor said?”
“It’s…it’s a puppy, right, sweetheart? That’s what we decided on, wasn’t it?”
My response to people (aunts, I am looking at YOU) who ask when we’re going to have children is to smile radiantly and ingenuously and say, “Well, actually…we’re hoping for a puppy.”
Ten years ago, they were asking me if I had a boyfriend yet and I said, “Oh yes, he’s named Euripides.” It’s like they never learned.
Those sound like concerns an evil stepmother in a fairy tale would have.
That's why I specified cisgender – even if you're assuming that your child will be cisgender, that's no real predictor of what raising him or her will be like. But of course you never know whether your child will indeed be cis!
This made me happy and excited to get pregnant.
Great sentiments, Aubrey. Just make sure he / she has access to all the black and gold he/ she wants!
I love this so much.
(But it did NOT HELP with my baby-craving ways, only exacerbated by the fact that I found out yesterday that the first of my friend group is pregnant and now I’m kind of vibrating with excitement for her but also envy.)
This is really lovely! It’s always nice to hear parents who don’t reduce children to genders, if rarer than it perhaps ought to be. Thank you so much for sharing!
(Just a small point of discomfort – obviously, it makes perfect sense to wish for your child to be healthy, but as someone who was a mildly sickly child and then a sick/disabled adult, I have often been made to feel that my parents’ love for me is conditional on how Healthy or Normal I can be or act – which is super uncomfortable. Not that I think this is what you’re implying, I just am like, mentally incapable of Not Saying Something about caring about sick babies :V)