I’m married to one of the most guy-ishy guys in the world. Having been raised by a single mom and not knowing what it was like to be around a man every day, John has been both fascinating and mysterious to me. He likes sports. A lot. He fixes things. He fixes things with duct tape. When I asked how he resolved conflicts when he was growing up, he told me a story which essentially involved him and his two brothers beating each other up…
So it would be natural to assume that he would be a fish out of water with his little family of a wife and three daughters. People we meet, and even people we know love to joke about it… “Your poor husband!” they say. When I was pregnant with Brookie, John took me out to a Mother’s Day dinner in Seattle. I escorted both Peyton and Quincy, who were 5 and 3 at the time, to the restroom with me. There was a woman in there, who in my memory has taken on the appearance of Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island. She regarded the two girls with me and then my pregnant belly. “That one is a boy?” she asked, pointing at my bump. “Another girl,” I told her. And she literally tsk’d at me and shook her head. “I’ll bet your husband is mad at YOU,” she said and walked away. At first it rolled off me. It was a joke, right? But the more I thought about it – the more those words bounced around in my thickly hormonally charged brain, the angrier I got. I wanted to go find her in the restaurant and say, “I bet your husband is mad at YOU.” But I didn’t. And that was just the beginning. We have heard that, and/or similar commentary quite frequently in our 5+ years of carting around 3 girls. John always smiles good-naturedly or just says, I love having my girls. And I will say similar things for the most part, though something inside of me wants to reach out to the moron who has made the comment and thump them in the forehead with my thumb and index finger.
So it makes sense to think that John would be elated with the idea of having a boy. Believe me, he is. But not in the way I imagined. The morning we found out our newest little one has boy parts, I expected John to lose his marbles – finally, a boy for him! I kept asking, “are you so excited, are you so excited, are you so excited!?” He calmly told me, “yes… but I would have been just as happy with another girl. I love having our girls.” And he meant it and I knew it. This week, my “guy-ishy guy” had the great pleasure of telling his three daughters some highly anticipated news. The date had been set for the annual Father/Daughter Ball. This, as the name suggests, is a dance in which Daddies take their coiffed and dressed up daughters to drink punch, eat cookies and dance the evening away to the likes of Taylor Swift and “Call me Maybe.” John has gone every year since Peyton was 2, and needless to say, it’s a pretty big deal around here. Huge deal. To my surprise, John also went out and bought all three girls their dresses and shoes. To my even greater surprise, he got Quincy to agree to wear a dress – a pink dress, no less, and fancy shoes. For the last year when I have attempted to get her in a dress, Quincy says shaking her head, “Mom, dresses are NOT my style. Pink is NOT my style.”
Make no mistake about it. This little boy child is going to be loved and spoiled like no other. He already has an impressive sports jersey collection going (that I’m not altogether stoked about) and both his Dad and sisters cannot wait for him. I cannot wait for him. I cannot wait to see what it is like to raise a son. But I think it’s important to know that we felt blessed beyond words with our three girls, too.
In closing, might I suggest something as a PSA of sorts? The next time you see a mom carting around her multiple daughters, instead of saying something along the lines of, “holy shit, that must suuuuuck… hope you have a gun think about all the hormones in a few years you poor thing your poor husband that’s a lot of estrogen think about when they all get their periods when are you going to try for a boy?” Say something along the lines of, “Wow 3 girls (or 4 or 5 or whatever) how cool.” After you help pick this mom off the floor, be prepared for a kiss… or at the very least some quiet gratitude for acknowledging that having all of one sex isn’t a deficiency of some sort. It’s a gift.
