Yesterday I took Anna to the bank to open her very first checking account. We walked in with Jack in tow, the other girls otherwise occupied at ballet class and Activity Days, and met with a very chatty banker, who walked us through the process.
We learned she has two boys and two girls of her own and that she LOVES babies (as evidenced by her constant fawning over Jack). She remarked, “You are going to LOVE having a boy. They are SO different than girls.” (As if girls were something worthy of disdain.). I thought to myself that aside from diaper changes, I hadn’t experienced anything remarkably different about having a boy, at least not in the first ten months.
She mentioned that her boys have been lucky-no broken bones, despite the fact that they tried to scale everything under the sun. I laughed. “Out of my four girls, three have broken bones. My boy? He’s broken three bones single-handedly.” I then went on to explain Jack’s bone condition and the manner in which he’d managed to secure multiple fractures within his first month of life. She stared at me, dumb-founded, and said, “Four girls? You have four girls?! I am SO sorry.”
Umm…so apparently having a boy with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease) doesn’t hold a candle to mothering four daughters. I laughed out loud.
You see, buying into gender stereotypes is not so much my thing. I cringe a little every time a mother calls her kid “all boy” or “all girl”, beaming with pride at this apparently all-encompassing fact.
This experience kind of reignited the whole nature vs. nurture debate in my head. While I believe that gender is an essential characteristic, it certainly isn’t the ONLY characteristic.
What are we teaching each gender when we vocally categorize raising one as more daunting than the other? When did some of us decide that we can chalk all personality traits up to one’s chromosomes? How did my sweet daughter, whom I am raising to be so much more than “all girl”, whatever that means, feel when a banker lumps all girls into the make-mothers-pull-their-hair-out category?
For the record, I love being the mother of girls. I love being a girl. While I recognize the gifts with which so many females are endowed, I steer clear of pigeon-holing my kids into a stereotype, particularly negative ones. There is so much variance among females that I would hate to inadvertently limit my daughters’ visions of who they can become by nodding in agreement when others express sympathy at the dominance of X chromosomes in my offspring. Sure, I’ll chuckle for a bit. And then I’ll set the record straight.