On Having a Boy

So I've been meaning to write this up for a long while, and I've finally got dribs and drabs of time here and there to do it. Actually, I'm glad it's taken me this long, because my ongoing thinking about this has expanded and really kind of illuminated a lot of things for me, and it's been an interesting journey. It might, in fact, have gotten so long that nobody will read it. But hey, if you can't indulge in tl;dr navel-gazing on your own blog, where can you? I'm still not sure I explain any of this well or even coherently, but I'll give it a go.

As many of you know, I have a son.

As many of you also probably know, I wanted a daughter.

I'm not upset, of course, with what life has dealt me. Have you seen my kid?! He's awesome! But having a boy has definitely led me to some soul-searching about my feelings on gender. Why did I want a girl so badly? What did I think would be different?

I've read a bunch of books on having boys, like Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood (which has multiple flaws I don't want to get into here) and It's A Boy!: Women Writers on Raising Sons. None of them have really connected with me where I live on this issue. I didn't want to have a girl so I could dress her up in cute clothes or have heart-to-heart girl talks or paint our nails together. I wasn't afraid to have a boy because "boys are different" or "boys are hard." But I had a distinct gender preference nonetheless, and when I found out I was having a boy, I started processing my bullshit around it. And I'm not sure I've stopped yet.

Before I get into my "reasons" for wanting a girl, I should tell you, I had a hard time for a few weeks when I found I was having a boy. I am a bit of a control freak, and so the whole pregnancy-and-impending-motherhood thing was hard enough for me. (I, of course, exacerbated it by reading a lot of feminist books about the short shrift mothers receive on America. Because my neuroses need regular watering to be all they can be, evidently.) My whole life was about to change! I was going to have to give up a lot of things! ...and I was going to have to give them up for a boy. I have Big Issues about changing my life for other people anyway, and especially about changing it to suit men. And with the between-the-legs blur on the ultrasound, all of those kicked in, on top of all my anxiety about impending motherhood. Suddenly, instead of a fetus, I felt like I was carrying The Man around in my womb.

Once I recognized this, I was able to laugh it off. Ridiculous, right? I'd make the same changes in my life no matter what the sex of my baby. But this should be some indicator of the kind of gender-related mines that salt my psyche. My feminism has mellowed since I went through the requisite lesbian-separatist phase in my undergrad years, but it hasn't waned. If anything, it's gotten stronger and more central to the way I see the world, particularly since I've become a mother. I recognize that not everyone sees the world through a gendered lens, but I can't help but feel, deep down, that I am right and other people are blind. ...yeah, I know. But al least I own up to it, okay?

So, why did I want a girl?

Reason one: My family.
I grew up very close to my mother's family, and my mother's family has an amazing matriarchal line. I knew my great-grandmother well, and am very close to my grandmother. Of my myriad aunts and cousins, only those in the direct female line of descent are strong, smart, educated, and successful. Indirect female line of descent (that is, the daughters of my uncles or great-uncles) is a mixed bag, and the men, well. Most of them have their good points. Some of them have more good points than others. But nobody would call any of them strong, smart, educated, and successful. Not a single one. And this is a big family; my great grandmother had eight children, and her children had two to five apiece, and their children...well. Maybe there's an exception in there somewhere; I haven't met all of my second cousins once removed, or probably even all of my second cousins. Still, I stand by my generalization. The daughters of my mother's mother's mother's house are exceptional.

I'm proud to come from a line of such amazing women. I carry on a lot of their traditional crafts (quilting, sewing, knitting, crocheting, baking) and I keep them all close to my heart. Having a girl would have been another for the direct matrilineage. And while some boy, someday, has got to buck the family trend, the precedents are not encouraging. Small sample statistics is one of my favorite self-entertainment games, but it's also something that I, like most irrational humans, buy into when it gets too close to my own anecdotal experience. I felt like a girl would have had the genetic deck stacked in her favor, at least on my side of the family. And a boy would have it stacked against.

Reason two: Male privilege.
Well, okay. That's more about why I didn't want a boy than about why I wanted a girl. But it's still a valid concern. It seems strange, perhaps, to want to have your child born on the wrong side of a social power division. Adversity may build character, but what parent wouldn't spare their child as much adversity as they could, given the choice? Well, me, I guess. But still, it's not like gender is the only (or even the primary) power correlate in our society, and I'm not offering to raise the Squid in privation rather than material comfort just because America has serious class issues (though don't think I haven't had dark thoughts along those lines). It's just, any kind of privilege a child has is like the world slipping it sweets on the sly while you are trying to keep it healthy. I have eaten that kind of metaphorical white candy and upper-class candy my whole life, and it's easy to get complacent on a diet of the stuff, to take it for granted, to decide that the world gives you treats because you deserve them, or to forget that it doesn't treat everyone with equal benevolence. I want my children to have empathy, and being on the "wrong" end of one or more power differentials can help foster that. Then again, the Squid is brown, and so one kind of privilege taketh even as the other giveth away, or something. Still, I know so very, very few men who actually think at all about the full extent and ramifications of their male privilege that gender is a very personal dividing line for me.

Reason three: An ingrained patriarchal value system.
I was trying to explain my issues to someone on my erstwhile mother's board and I said something like: I would like to have a child who grows up to be (not necessarily in this or any other order):

• Happy and balanced
  
• Comfortable and realistic about who they are
  
• Empathetic and sympathetic to others
  
• Interested and engaged in learning
  
• Self-directed and motivated
  
• Emotionally healthy and expressive
  
• Able to pursue what they want and need
  
• Sexually competent/confident
  
• A good and loyal friend and/or partner
  
• Socially conscious and responsible

Okay, so it's a tall order. I'm still working on a lot of it myself. But I said (at the time) that I thought our society made some of these things harder for girls than for boys, and some of these things harder for boys than for girls. And that I thought I'd be better at helping the girls with their hard things than the boys.

Of course, the more I think about this, the more I realize that two types of bullshit are going on here. One is just pure parental arrogance, that one person could think their opinions and beliefs could hold back such a tide. Not that parents don't have influence, but it's heavily mitigated. I can hope. I can try. But as every feminist whose child has whined for Barbie or pacifist whose kid wanted to dress in camouflage for Hallowe'en can attest, I will be just one voice among many. I still don't handle money well, despite my mother's constant lessons in frugality, nor time, despite her instruction and example in efficiency. Some things will stick. Some will not. I need to cultivate more acceptance around this, perhaps.

The second type of bullshit is one that is so crazy insidious I can't even repudiate it. I mean, given a list of adjectives - strong, nurturing, gentle, stoic, businesslike, tender, caring, self-assured - most people could separate those out into "traditional" gender roles, right? And because we live in a man's world, the adjectives are weighted - women who are strong, stoic, businesslike, and self-assured get ahead in life and win respect, while men who are nurturing, gentle, tender, and caring may not. It's a hierarchy, not just a divide. Sure, you can argue the exceptions, and it's a lot blurrier than it used to be - but the fact remains that I have chosen to value a lot of traditionally masculine traits over a lot of traditionally feminine ones. I am not particularly nurturing, gentle, or tender. I don't want to be. Those are not things I value. I've swallowed the dominant value system whole.

I feel like I'm explaining this poorly, but let me keep trying, from a different angle. Trying to be "more like the boys" is never going to get the girls into the clubhouse. It has to be just as important, just as valued, to get the boys to want to come to the tea party, to raise sensitive guys as well as tough girls. More women in math and science is never going to even the balance until more men start going into education and social work. If we are ever to get to any kind of equality, there has to be a place in the middle for both sides to meet. (There is probably a great deal of feminist theory that says this better than I can. There is probably even a word for it. I don't read feminist theory, never have, so I couldn't tell you. Educate me if you know, yeah?)

In other words, maybe I would have been better at teaching a little girl to do the traditionally non-feminine stuff. But is that really something I should value? A lifetime of ingrained thinking is hard to work against, but I'm trying.

Reason four: Women are awesome.
Seriously, awesome. I've chosen to live and socialize in primarily female communities for most of my adult life. Almost all my housemates in college were women. Most of my workplaces have been predominantly female. Three out of five of the online communities in which I have been heavily involved are over 90% female. Most, though not all, of my close friends are women. I have filled my life up to the brim with amazing women. Of course, this one doesn't hold water either. The way I relate to my friends and co-workers will not be the way I relate to my children, regardless of gender. And it's not like there aren't amazing men out there, I just haven't gravitated toward them in the same way.

in the end, none of my "reasons" really holds up to examination. But when I put them all together unexamined, they sure gave me a strong gender preference. It's taken me almost a year and a half to unpack it this far, and I'm sure there are more layers of bullshit lurking underneath this; auto-archaeology is like that.

Several of you said you'd be interested, so I wrote this up. I'm not sure what it does to put it out there like this, and I have reservations about it. But. *hits post*

Staying at my Aunt K's house is a unique experience. Hard to explain it unless you've been here. For example, if you were to ask me, "How did you get that goose-egg bruise on your forehead?" I would have to tell you, "Oh, I was climbing over the boxes of books next to the carousel rocking horse so that I could unplug the neon clock, and I hit my head on the pinball machine."

Squidbits (belated)

CRAP. I wrote this up two weeks ago and forgot to post it. Well, here you go. I am a crappy blogger.

Seeing as how it is Mother's Day, I should probably come up with a Squidbits post. I'm only, hmmm, two weeks overdue, after all. It's just, the post I might have written two weeks ago is not the post I want to write today. We went to Illinois with a baby who had just started to walk a bit and was unusually squirmy and chatty. We came back with a toddler.

It was just that sudden. A week and a half and there was a visible, a palpable difference. We went with a baby. We came back with a toddler. When did it happen? When he learned to point at things he wanted? When he started walking more than he crawled? When he started crying angrily when thwarted? I'm not sure.


Squid with a sculpture in Millennium Park

We are now officially behind on the childproofing. A toddler can reach drawers and knobs that a crawling child can't, and we haven't installed the latches on the less-dangerous cabinets. It is not uncommon to find the Tupperware in the living room, or the shampoo in the hallway. He has also developed a penchant for putting things away, though not with any sense of how/when/why the wider world thinks it is right to do so. He spent fifteen minutes one day putting a small plastic doll in a box, shaking the box until the doll fell out, and then putting it back in. That was a month ago. Since then he has stashed all his Easter eggs in an empty Kleenex box, put his socks in the pantry, hidden his toothbrush amongst his toys, and developed a fixation with Ziploc bags. On the plane, he pulled the window open and shut, open and shut for a quarter of an hour.


Playing near Lola's pond with friend F.

He makes up his own games now - headbutting is a favorite, or grabbing a telephone and putting it to my ear to make me talk. Funny faces make him laugh, and hand-motion songs (the itsy-bitsy spider, etc.) fascinate him. He can clap and point and wave bye-bye, though he does none of those consistently when prompted. When you say, "How big is Baby Squid?" he'll raise his hands over his head to show you that he is "Sooooo big!" And of course, my favorite, for the pure joy involved - the dancing you saw a few months ago in his pimp turtle music video has become more coordinated, with less head-banging and more clapping, and some full body sways and jumping. We were watching The Blues Brothers last week and he started laughing and dancing during the musical numbers. Baby's got rhythm, and he loves music. We sing and dance almost every day.

He'll bring me books to read, and sometimes even sit still through multiple repetitions. He turns the pages (as long as I carefully release one at a time to spring up for turning) and pays attention to the pictures, pointing at things he wants to talk about. He tunes into screens, too, and I've given up on not letting him see television until he's two - not only does he get to watch it at daycare (the only thing I dislike about his otherwise amazing daycare), Himself likes to occasionally watch The Daily Show while the Squid's awake, and I sometimes put on a nature documentary in the background; I find it soothing, myself, and sometimes we can talk about the animals onscreen and what they are doing if he seems interested. We're still fairly sparing - I think he probably sees TV a few times a week at most - but I'm a little surprised at myself for not being bothered more about it.


Squid's first sushi! A maki in each fist - and he wants to share with you.

He is so much fun, now. This is my favorite time yet; still no tantrums or wilful disobedience (though believe you me, I can see it coming fast) and yet so much laughter and curiosity! Still no words, but lots of baby songs and babble and expression. He's mobile without being so fast I can't keep up with him, and interested and interactive without being constantly demanding. It's awesome. And I swear he gets cuter every day. I was looking at him the other day and just marvelling that this amazing little person is, in some way, mine.

I kiss him all the time, and I'm starting to realize that this is a limited window as well. Some day I won't be able to give him kisses as much as I want. Some day he won't want me to pick him up. Some day I won't be able to squeeze his wide little thighs or just touch his cheek because he's so amazing and I want to. Little by little, we will develop reserve, grow apart in this respect, separate out personal space. And that's okay - I also won't be crawled over all the time, or have to tote around a 24-pound weight on one hip while doing everything one-handed, and I won't really miss that. There are losses and gains to each new step. But I'm getting my kisses and cuddles in while I can. They feed my heart, and I am storing up as much as I can against the long cold winter of Growing Up.


Squid and mama with the shiny jellybean sculpture in Millennium Park

It was a big month, and not just because it was *cough* six weeks long. We had two plane rides, two train rides, car trips, new people to meet, museums to go to, baby's first sushi, babysitters, playmates, aunts, uncles, second cousins, grandparents, colds and sniffles, baby's first ice cream, baby's first cake, llama feeding, parties, zoo trips, hikes, parks, petting cats, petting dogs, reading books, dancing, babbling, and walking, walking everywhere. No wonder he crashes out at 8 p.m. every night. It's exhausting, being the Squid.

yes i said yes i will yes

We just got back from the Maker's Faire and it was fucking awesome. The crowd was great for people-watching; equal parts old robotics dudes, middle-class families, Silicon Valley nerds, Bay Area hipsters, and Burning Man types. They had a robotics building (with some amazing found-object sculpture) and a craft building, art cars, wooden bicycles, hybrid plug-in vehicles, driving cupcakes, demonstrations and talks, rocket launches, live Robot Wars, and (my favorite) interactive art. We paid a guy with a manual typewriter whose sign said "Poems About Anything" a couple of bucks to write a poem about the Squid (reproduced at the end of this post). He was so friendly and positive and nice about it; I liked him very much.

Relatedly, at a work event the other night I had the opportunity to see The Way Things Go, a half-hour-long film of an art installation that is part found-object sculpture, part chem lab, part Rube Goldberg machine, and all genius. I am getting the DVD as a gift for half the people I know this year; if you have a chance to check it out, you totally should.

Just this morning I decided that my new sort of mantra about life is going to be "yes I said yes I will yes".* I am ready to be more active, more engaged, more positive. Even if all I end up doing with my new mantra is running outside instead of on the treadmill, or writing more, or taking a class in something, I'm excited about it. It's spring. My garden looks awesome. I have a job. I'm wearing a shirt that has the Sneetches on it. Life is good.

the poem about anything that was about the squid who sat on my shoulders while it was being written

smile and wavemakesbabies
once names get traded and
maybe the parents have to
meet each other via the
smile and wave at the camera
because that's what the world
is but neither of us know whe
are in the movie except for
baby [squid] making his big debut
at seven foot tall future
of cute right now

* I really, really want to get a tattoo of this. However, I require myself to wait several years after the initial idea before getting anything tattooed on my body; this has helped me avoid regret in the past. So, a few Bloomsdays from now, maybe.

lolbaby: I HAS A BUCKET

I have an unholy love for pet humor. People's stories about their pets, if reasonably well-told, can have me doubled over wheezing with laughter like nothing else. What can I say? It's a weakness. Dogs in Elk made me cry, I laughed so hard, and Sars of Tomato Nation never fails to slay me with her cat stories.

Naturally, I am a devotee of cat macros. I visit I Can Has Cheezburger? more often than I want to admit, and when Anil Dash posted his analysis of cat macro pidgin, Cats Can Has Grammar, I rejoiced. (Nothing ruins a cat macro as fast as poor kitty pidgin - it's like hearing me trying to use hip urban slang. Painful.)

However, as himself is allergic, I no longer have cats. And since our dog pack went down from three to two, and aged a bit, they don't get up to much other than couch lolling and the occasional postman barking anymore. I cannot participate in pet humor culture!

I do, however, have a baby.



If this makes no sense to you at all? Congratulations - you have a much more sophisticated sense of humor than I do. Not that that's saying much.