When I was pregnant with the Kid, I wanted a boy. Not because of family names or because boys are inherently better than girls. I was a bit terrified of what kind of mother I’d be to a girl. In my family, boys are so coddled and loved that we might as well be Chinese or Indian, and girls suffer. That’s how it is. And at 19 years old, I didn’t know if I had the skills to break that family tradition. I didn’t want to do to my daughter what had been done to me, or to my mother and aunts. Having a boy meant that I could skip all the reprogramming my brain would need. A boy I could just love, a girl would require much more serious therapy.

I’ve always been a feminist, from the time I was a little girl. It was always glaringly obvious to me how unfair it was that I was the one who got blamed for a messy house or who had to put their needs aside in favor of my brother. My mom showed up to every one of my brother’s baseball games (which he hated playing) but never went to single one of my volleyball or softball games, never came to watch me cheer a football or basketball game, and only showed up to state cheering competition when I begged. By the time I was the Kid’s age, my mom was doing everything she could to push me out of the house including moving into homes where everyone had a bedroom but me(and my anger at the whole situation made me happy to leave). Girls in my family are supposed to work their asses off, all the time. Boys get pats on the head just for trying.

It wasn’t until I cut off contact with my mother that I started examining the minutia of feminism, the things beyond access to work and reproductive rights. By that time, the Kid was 8. If he had been a girl, that poor child would have had 8 years of a life with a horrible parent. I’ve made some mistakes with the kid, but overall I’ve been a good mom to him. If he had been a girl, I don’t know that would have been true until a few years ago.

Please understand, this isn’t because girls are more difficult children. They aren’t. I cringe whenever someone says things like ” be thankful he’s a teenage boy and not a girl, then you’d be in real trouble”. The only thing that makes girl babies harder to raise is that society hates them so fiercely, and that parents are part of society. If the kid was a girl, right now I would be dealing with creepy middle aged men (and teenage ones too) who think growing boobs means a girl is asking to be sexually harassed. I would be walking a fine line between trying to keep her safe from rape without making her feel that not being raped is her responsibility. I would be trying to teach her that she is beautiful but that is not all she is when every message she gets from the world says that she must fix her physical flaws or no one will love her. The Kid is chubby, but if he was a chubby girl (highly likely given our genes) I’d be struggling with keeping him healthy and keeping him from an eating disorder (or an exercise disorder with a mild case of orthorexia- which is what I had). The biggest struggle I have with a chubby boy is finding pants that fit, and now that he wears grown up clothes it’s much easier.

Everytime I make the kid do the dishes is an act of feminist rebellion. The rule of the house is either you do the cooking or you do the clean up. But if he was a girl, I would just be reinforcing the idea that the house is the responsibility of the woman. My brother, at 32 years old, hasn’t washed a dish in forever. And I know cause he used to pay me to wash his dishes and do his laundry and clean his bathroom. The Kid knows how to scrub a toilet and used to help me with paid cleaning gigs.

Until a few years ago, I wouldn’t have even recognized most of these things as issues. I might have blindly gone into things in the exact same way my mother did. And at 19, I knew that there were all these tiny issues that needed to be dealt with, but I didn’t know what they were. So when the ultra-sound revealed that he was a boy, I felt relieved. This I could do. I could be a good mom to him.

Now 15 years later, I could be a good mom to a girl. Now there wouldn’t be an 8 year lag between me figuring my shit out and becoming a better parent. Now, most of the baggage from my horrid childhood wouldn’t be passed on to a girl child.

So when I read this, I took a deep breath and made a wish for this woman’s daughter.