WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I tell friends that I’m pregnant, their first question after “Congratulations” is almost always “Do you know what you want?” We like to respond that we won’t know the gender until our child is 18 and that they’ll let us know then. ...She gave birth to a boy, and posted the above picture of her breastfeeding him.I like the idea of forcing as few gender stereotypes on my child as possible. ...
When I bring this thought to my therapist, she explains that this is relatively common. ...
I resent that his entire family’s DNA is inside of me but that my DNA is not inside him. “It just seems unfair,” I say, ...
I’m scared of having a son too, although not in the same way. I’ve known far too many white men who move through the world unaware of their privilege, and I’ve been traumatized by many of my experiences with them. And boys too; it’s shocking to realize how early young boys gain a sense of entitlement — to girls’ bodies and to the world in general. ...
My friend who is the mother to a three-year-old boy tells me that she didn’t think she cared about gender until her doctor broke the news that she was having a son. She burst into tears in her office. “And then I continued to cry for a whole month,” she says matter-of-factly. After a difficult birth experience, she developed postpartum depression and decided that she resented her husband more than she’d ever imagined possible. She told me she particularly hated — and she made an actual, physical list that she kept in her journal, editing it daily — how peacefully he slept. “There is nothing worse than the undisturbed sleep of a white man in a patriarchal world.” She shakes her head. “It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was bringing yet another white man into the world. But now I adore him and can’t imagine it any other way.” She also eventually learned to love her husband again. The sound of his perfect sleep next to her at night is now tolerable.
She is seeing a psychotherapist, so I guess she at least recognizes that she has a mental illness. I am guessing that she has a sense of entitlement that is greater than any man I know.
You know, I’ve told my daughters, granddaughters from the time they got old enough to understand what I was saying — and I mean it: There’s not a single thing a man can do that a woman can’t do as well or better. Not a single thing.Both men and women can say dopey things.
No comments:
Post a Comment