I always imagined myself as the mother of daughters. I come from a family of girls (the middle child of three sisters), I am a lesbian (a woman who loves women); from the time I was small, girls were always, always: my favorite and my best. Girls were safe, familiar, relatable. And when, at the age of 22, I conceived my first pregnancy, I felt certain that the child within me was female. Being pregnant felt grounding and the life within me, soft; she must be a girl.
In fact, I was quite wrong. I was wrong every time. Three pregnancies resulted in four sons (the first two came as a pair), and my initial years of mothering greatly expanded my understanding of all things boy. I came to claim this unsought identity, a gift from my children: I was absolutely--and fiercely so--the mother of sons.
Now I find myself, 8 years into this whole parenting gig, incorporating a new vision, developing a new identity. This fresh and unexpected life includes, among other things (an ex-wife, a new partner, shared custody): two girl children; two daughters.
They are small enough (at 6 and 3) to accept me easily as a mother, to find comfort in my mother-body, to want me to claim them just as much as I want them to claim me. But they are grown enough that I feel still a few steps behind, not entirely sure about how it is they see the world, or what makes them tick. How strange to realize, four sons later, that these daughters are somewhat foreign to me--not just because they are coming into my life at a later stage in development--in part because they are girls.
The other day, I found myself annoyed by their need (or desire) for dresses and skirts.
"Can't everything just be gender-neutral? Why do we have to buy into this? Shorts and t-shirts are so much more practical!" I complain to their mother, she who is wise in the ways of daughters, these two in particular.
She sighs in response, "Because it matters to them. We can't just make them wear the clothes that we would want. We have to respect their identities, too."
I feel skeptical, the way I imagine my sister (when my niece was small, before she birthed my nephew) raised her eyebrows at my twin sons' love of construction vehicles. Are these desires born or made?
A few days later, I find myself scouring ebay for dresses made by Olive Juice. I like the old-fashioned look of them.
My lover shakes her head at me, "I thought you were anti-dresses," she laughs.
In truth, shopping (even just "window shopping," or the online equivalent) for dresses feels exceptionally indulgent--and it's not just that I worry I am giving into some social construct about gender or what it means to be a girl--because it is a category from which I had come to accept that I was, and would be, excluded. I had grieved my lack of daughters, and the dress purchasing that might come with them. I had come to feel at peace about it.
Now, as I contemplate corduroy jumpers and striped cardigans, I let myself fast-forward to puberty, to the menarche rituals I imagine performing in the girls' honor, and then beyond: to eventual pregnancies and births. I envision phone calls and coffee dates, confessions of first love, and celebratory shoe shopping. I let myself taste a bit of this once-longed-for future that I thought would ultimately be missing from my story of mother/womanhood.
But in letting myself carry on like this, I taste also the full weight of what it means to raise girls, the ways in which being a mother of daughters is a different flavor of responsibility from that which I have grown into with my boy children. And I sense the ways in which a mother's identity as a woman might feel differently entangled in the identity of girl children who will also grow to be women.
I close the browser without bidding on anything. I'm not sure that I really qualify yet, I don't know that I truly belong in the "Olive Juice Dresses" section of ebay.
But maybe I will someday, after all.
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