Having A Girl

Anyone who asked me how I felt when I was pregnant knew that I was terrified of having a girl.

My fear seemed totally rationale: I did not think I would know how to raise a healthy, confident female, and moreover, I was scared of ruining her by the osmosis of my own insecurities. In addition, I saw no way of any girl that shared my DNA escaping the scarring aftermath of puberty, which in my experience was uniquely awful for girls.

 There are certainly some great elements to my genes, but I highly doubt any of my XX chromosomes don’t contain the ribonucleic acid for hairiness, chubbiness, frizzy hair and acne.

My awkward stage – defined by bee-sting boobs poking out of a bralette in a baby-tee, the burning in my nostrils of Jolene bleach on my upper lip, and the general feeling of wanting to crawl up and die every time I wasn’t asked to slow dance at a Bat Mitzvah – was something I simply could not re-live, let alone have my child experience it herself.

 Gut-wrenching-awkward-stage (and silliness) aside, I had no idea how to provide guidance to a girl trying to navigate a landscape overridden with obstacles, half of which weren’t even there the day before, when I myself still wake up every morning questioning 10% – 50% of my existence and decisions.

 There is so much pressure for women to be not one thing but everything. The rules are constantly being redefined for girls and women and I find this is stressful and confusing even as a 36 year old.

Between the concern that I would be over-empathetic and painfully over-sensitive about the adolescent challenges, and that I would be contrastingly ill-equipped to advise on everything from social media bullying to gender roles in a relationship, I became convinced that it would be impossible for me to have a functional relationship with my daughter. And so of course, I became pregnant with a girl.

 I spent the majority of my pregnancy envisioning my future daughter as one of two things – so beautiful, smart and confident that I would be jealous of her, or so ugly and fat that I would feel terrible for her and her lack of success in the world. Yes, I am crazy.

 Or am I??

 Maybe I internalize the external pressures on females more than the next person, but even if these cues aren’t stifling you, or making you fear for your relationship with your daughter, and your mom, or your sister, or your friends, I think you feel the heaviness of their burden in some meaningful way that has defined big and small choices that you have made, the sum of which are now the course of your life.

I was particularly at odds with the idea that I could have a dysfunctional relationship with my daughter. It’s not that my relationship with my mom is terrible. In fact, it is quite the opposite: we are supportive champions of each other, we speak truly openly with one another, we thoroughly enjoy spending time together and doing similar activities. But it has always been kind of challenging (for multiple reasons I’ll explore in this narrative). To confirm that most mother/daughter relationships are fraught with some level of strife, when my girl friends told me my fears were unfounded, I asked them whether they fought with their mom, or went through a period when they were mean, which was a tough point to counter, until the words, “BUT GIRLS CLOTHES ARE SOOOO CUTE!” ended the conversation. Which is a pretty limp rebuttal to the confirmation that teenage girls are the scariest mammal on this earth.

 My first child was a boy (Sy turns 4 years old this June) and I had not secretly, but rather pretty openly, yearned for a second boy. My perspective of mother/son relationships was that they were SIMPLE. Not only that, but that a boy would just be emotionally easier. That boys don’t dwell on emotions, withhold them or overanalyze them…they feel what they feel and they express them. That boys’ lives are free from the shackles that media and social norms imprisons women within. In this retrospective I realize that is a little (well maybe a lot) naïve but, whatever, life still seems generally EASIER for boys. And I wanted that for my child, and I wanted that for my relationship with my child.

So I spent my entire pregnancy in a somewhat conflicted state. People told me how lucky I was to be having a girl and I sort of just nodded and smiled. Besides the normal anxieties surrounding the unknowns of pregnancy, mine were compounded with the fears that my second child and I would have a jealous or competitive relationship, that a happy life would be sabotaged by social media and body image. And then a few weeks before Remi was born, my mom lost her mom.

 My Grammy, as we fondly called her since we could speak, was a few months into her 95th year when she passed. Her death was not tragic nor was it unexpected, but like all deaths it still was incomprehensible that one day she was here and the next she was not. My mother mourned the loss of not only her mom but also her best friend. Even before Grammy was in a steep decline, my mom and Grammy spoke every day. They spent hours together several times a week. When someone commented that my mom looked like Grammy, she flushed with pride. “Mom always reminded me of Jackie O., she’s so beautiful.” They really did look, speak, and act like sisters, which was the greatest compliment my mother could have received.

 As I watched my mom’s loss over her truly magnificent relationship with her mother, I not only acknowledged how special my own bond with my mom is, but also finally understood the potential for how insanely lucky I was to be entering my own mother/daughter unit. And that no matter how crazy of a teenager little Remi might one day be, at the end of the day, my life and experience as a woman was going to be blessed by a dimension that not all females get to experience – that of the mother of a daughter.

To be clear – I couldn’t figure out how to write this introduction without sounding ungrateful and offensive. I know there are plenty (if not all?) women who pine for a baby girl. Who pine for a baby. Who have lost their mothers, too early. I want to state that not an hour of the day goes by when I don’t think about the literal miracles that are my children, and that my parents are healthy, and my husband a saint.

 But being grateful unfortunately doesn’t eliminate anxiety, which I have a shit ton of, depression, which I teeter on, insecurity, which on a bad day seems insurmountable, and a low grade eating disorder as well as obsessive compulsive relationship with exercise, which I know can’t be resolved until the three former ones are addressed.

For whatever reason, I am certain these parts of me are going to have more of an impact on a daughter than on a son, or, if I’m smart and utilize my writing as my therapist, psycho-analyst and self-medication, at least be recognized and contained. And maybe addressed?

All my life, writing has served these functions. If I could package my drama du jour into a tight story with a beginning, middle and end, I usually found resolution. I am not sure I found it in this post. But maybe the next.