A woman I know who is pregnant has found out she's expecting a boy. Initially both she and her husband were not sure how to respond to the news. The man worried that their son would be a sporty, macho type, which he adamantly is not. She felt surprised that her female body could be producing a male - but now she's moving towards relief, relief that she won't be able to totally replicate the entwined relationship she has with her own mother.
After the initial surprise when I learnt I was pregnant with a boy (surprise that was mainly based around the realisation that the baby was real), I felt relief too. I was relieved that my narcissism would have a boundary placed on it - that there'd be a limit to my identification with the child. Before the baby had even been born, I could imagine the intense, contradictory feelings I'd have for a daughter. I think I would have had impossibly high expectations of a girl and of myself as feminist mother of a daughter. A boy felt like an unknown, in the positive sense - he was free to be whoever he turned out to be.
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