www.carolineandtony.com

It’s A Girl!

May 11th, 2006 Caroline

When I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamt the baby was a girl. She was beautiful in my dreams, blonde and blue-eyed. But, nightmarishly, she was a teenager, one of the popular ones. I woke in a cold sweat at the thought of producing a “mean girl,” like one that had so intimidated me in high school.

I was surprised and therefore also relieved that my baby was a boy; when my second son was born three years later I was surprised again (no mother’s intuition here!) yet also the very tiniest bit crestfallen. I’d just always assumed that, like my mother and my sister before me, I’d have one – or some – of each, a son and a daughter. But here I am, the mother of sons, and quite happily so; what am I doing writing about It’s A Girl?

Honestly, I’d devoured It’s A Boy this winter, finding so many points of common experience with these amazing writers, so many stories that entertained and assured me about mothering sons. I wanted more. Some of these writers appear in both collections; some of them are new to me. All of them spoke to me about being a mother, regardless of the gender of your children; taught me about being a daughter (because of course I am still that); and reminded me to lend a more understanding ear to my friends who are mothers of daughters.

I was moved by “Links,” Jennifer Lauck’s 3 a.m. musings, as she holds her newborn baby girl, on the birth mother she never knew. Rachel Hall’s gorgeous “Breasts: A Collage” has me paying closer attention to nursing as these milky days with my baby wind down. And Catherine Newman’s sweet essay,”Baby Fat,” reminded me what we can and should learn about our bodies and ourselves from our children: “So my job now is to love myself, because…well, not to be immodest, but the baby wants to be just like me… Let her always love [her] tummy. And let me be more like her.”

I love the clear and direct feminism of Rebecca Steinitz’s “Tough Girls,” an essay I thought about a lot recently when, bike shopping with my son, he headed right for a “girly bike.” And while I can’t relate to the details in Miriam Peskowitz’s essay about her cheerleading daughter , I do relate to the message: we need to let our kids be themselves. I thought of my son’s recent experiments with “dress-up hair” when Peskowitz writes of her daughter, “She’s experimenting, of course, as we all are: figuring out who she will be today as she steps out to be in the world, figuring out how to be a girl.”

I was impressed by Jenny Block’s bravery, in “On Being Barbie,” writing about how her own plastic surgery might affect her daughter, and moved by Ann Douglas’ “The Food Rules.” Her essay and Jill Siler’s brilliant, aching “Twenty Minutes” also got me thinking, reluctantly, about mothering an older child. It seems hard some days, my life seems so busy with my four year-old and my almost-one-year old, but I know, truly, our struggles are so uncomplicated, our days so sweet. I hate to think of looking wistfully at Ben’s back as he heads into school, longing for a glance back from him, but I know that day is coming all too soon.

Barbara Atkinson’s essay, “Isolation,” speaks to that longing, too. “But—oh!—where is that sticky hand wrapped around my finger, those feet stumbling slightly as we inch our way around the block, stopping to look at every rock and flower and bug? Where is the weight of that buttery-scented, sleeping head on my shoulder? It’s funny that I ever worried she would not feel separate from me when I find myself so carefully, delicately trying to rewrap those tender threads that connected us.”

And it is Atkinson who writes the sentence I want posted on billboards as reminders to us all: “No man is an island, but every new mother is a sandbar, with regular tidal flooding and the occasional threat of submersion.”

Sunday is Mother’s Day. It’s A Girl (or it’s sibling, It’s A Boy) would make a fine, meaningful gift for any mother you know.

Entry Filed under: Reviews