Several readers responded to yesterday’s post with a variant of the question, “if you are so worried about being able to raise a psychologically healthy girl who is comfortable in her own body, why are you only interested in adopting a girl?” The short answer is because that when David and I envision our lives with a child, she is always a girl. The longer answer is, well, longer.
I can only speak for myself here, because while David has shared his reasons for wanting a girl with me, they are not mine to share.
For as much as I have fears about raising a girl, I have even more about raising a boy. And try as I may, I am struggling to articulate why. The thoughts are there in my head, but the words keep coming out wrong as I type them. I will do my best, but please cut me some slack because I have never tried to explain this in a public forum before.
To me, it just feels like the stakes are higher with raising boys. Without wading into the murky depths of discussions on privilege, I fear that it is just too easy to default to the status quo when raising a boy. Because, let’s face it, there are some assumptions about boys that are an uphill battle to change. To pull a phrase from the late 80s/early 90s, I am comfortable subverting the dominant paradigm, but I am not sure I know how to do that when working within the dominant paradigm.
I have had lots of conversations about parenting boys with the parents of some of my favorite boys. I must admit that I am a little envious them. I feel like those parents know some secret that I do not. Maybe it is just because in the circle I have always moved in, there has been an explicit understanding of the challenges in both being and raising girls. But what I have not been privy to are the conversations about the challenges of both raising and being boys. Perhaps now that more fathers are becoming (or finally being recognized as) primary parents, that conversation will change.
It is also possible that I will see things differently once I am a seasoned parent. One thing I know from my niecelettes is that kids come with their own personalities from the very beginning. And that parental responsibility is much more about providing guidance to their child and much less about creating a good person out of whole cloth. But just because I know that intellectually does not mean I will feel any more grounded or capable when it is my turn to parent. And that is ultimately why I want a girl. Because there is already enough uncertainty in parenthood that I would at least like to stack the deck a little in my favor.