It’s not a complete overstatement to say that I wasted the first half of my life wishing for boys, and then wasted the second half wishing for girls.
I’ve blogged previously on Tracy Hogg and her emphasis on loving the child you’ve got, and I do, I really do adore the three individuals we’ve been entrusted to look after. They are endlessly, wondrously endearing and fascinating to me; they are each their own amazing little person with their own qualities and interests, and so much in them to discover and nurture and love; and they’re ever-changing, always with new ideas and hobbies and stories and questions (and if this sentence has got out of control like that bit at the beginning of Ephesians, that’s just because there is so much to gush about). I love their sweet little warm bodies which we somehow miraculously formed and more than once I have caught myself stroking a boy’s soft little feet against my face just because they are so lovely and delicious. I love the sound and intonation of their voices, even when I want to be asleep, or when they have called for me a million times a day or told me the same joke or read me the same book over and over. I love our boys to their cores, I love them quirks and all, I love them all the more fiercely when they are at their most vulnerable, I love them sometimes with a raging power that wants to shout out like a voice from heaven: “This is my son. With him I am well pleased.” (I once told one son I nearly did this whilst watching him perform as the narrator in the school play, and he looked mortified at the thought of it). I wouldn’t ever want to swap any of them for all the world, even for once of those ‘angel’ children that Hogg wrote about, who always smile and sleep well.
But I also thought I wanted a girl, and I think that’s ok.
I grew up in an all-female household (just me and my mum) and went to brownies and knitting club and dancing lessons, and my world was pretty feminine. Which is my excuse for being a boy-interested teen and I think God had the right idea to let me meet my husband early, whilst I was still at university, to save me from further embarrassment. So it is kind of funny to me that my world is now so full of boys, a kind of in-joke, a pleasing balancing of the scales. When the boys have friends round, and we have a house bursting with boys, all messy and loud, I kind of laugh that the former me would have found this idea so appealing!
But girls were what I knew, and a girl was what I thought I wanted. I imagined I should dress her in cute outfits and teach her to dance and she would be like me; she would play with my old ponies and Barbies that my mum had saved in her loft.
When we found out the gender of our firstborn, we continued to buy gender neutral things, accessorised the nursery yellow and bought a red buggy, because with three children in mind, the odds were that a girl would come, right? When we discovered the gender of our second, my husband squeezed my hand and joked, “Well, we’ll just have to keep trying until we have a girl.” (I had recently watched a TV programme called, ‘8 boys and wanting a girl’ and it was pretty obvious why this would be a terrible plan). When we spotted the gender of our third (they were all very cooperative in this regard – there was no uncertainty!), I’m afraid a little bit of me went into mourning for the daughter I’d never have. Does that sound horribly ungrateful?
Having three children is only an average-ish number to have, and if you have three children you have a ¼ chance of their all being of the same sex, and yet it seems that having three boys is something remarkable, literally remarkable, in that it invites remarks from people in supermarkets and parks along the lines of: “Three boys – they must keep you busy!” or “You must have your hands full.” Or “They’ll eat you out of house and home.”
It’s a special club, the all-boy mum club. After our third gender scan, I told an older mum friend in the three-boy club, a seamstress, how I was delighted to have another boy but sad that this meant no girl for us as we’d agreed to stop at three, and she patted my hand and told me she understood and she had always dreamed of making her daughter’s wedding dress, and now she never would.
At one point, I clicked on an ad for matching mother-and-daughter outfits and now Facebook continuously mocks me with cute mother-and-daughter coordinating clothes. Instead, I used to get pleasure from dressing up the boys to look like each other or like my husband, but they’re a bit less willing now. Once a friend’s daughter wore an outfit that was coincidentally very close to mine and I was really very pleased and wanted a photo but decided that that would be weird.
But in my broody moments, when I imagine what life would be like with one more child, that hypothetical child is a boy now, because boys are what I know, or what I’m learning to know, at least. It still sometimes feel like uncharted territory, but I’m discovering all sorts of boy stuff, like how often you tell a male toddler to get his hands out of his pants, and how the most innocuous and gender-neutral toy like multilink will be turned into a weapon, and who are the best authors that write literature marketed at boys.
Today in the library there was a mum browsing with her three boys and we started chatting and comparing ages in the way you do when you meet someone in the all-boy club, and she added, gesturing to a baby bump: “And this one is a boy too!” and I responded with genuine delight for her: “Oh how lovely! They will all be such good friends.” (a line I remember my mum used on me to cheer me from my third baby, no-daughter funk).
And the boys are friends. They are very much different personalities, but they have plenty of shared interests, like lightsaber battles and Minecraft tutorials, that I don’t know would be the case if they were other than who they are.
I am delighted with my lot. It is very well with my soul. And I kind of wish I could go back to the teenage me and say, “Don’t worry – the boys are coming.” And it is also a lovely thought that one day an older me with some kind-hearted daughters-in-law and maybe some granddaughters on her lap might want to look back and tell current me to hang on, that there are girls ahead.
And maybe I’ll wish we hung onto those My Little Ponies.
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