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Gender disappointment

Boy or Girl

Boy or girl? What if you don’t get what you’d longed for?

This is something rarely spoken about, discovering the gender of your baby despite knowing they’re healthy sometimes is still a shock or disappointing, sometimes easily brushed off and sometimes not…. Having experienced this to some extent myself I think it’s important to be more open about why we may feel like this. We have our own reasons, mine was the need to heal my own experiences through raising a girl. I’m sure I’ll share that one day. However, this is ones mums story around this issue.

With love and respect for this mothers bravery and honesty…. xx

“We don’t talk about that do we. But it’s real. And it isn’t temporary. Well I don’t think it is anyway, but I am only two years into it, maybe I’m at the peak and it will soon fade. But maybe it won’t. Maybe it will be like a form of grief, where it doesn’t go but you grow around it instead. You have triggers. You have good days and bad. Some of them can be really bleak, painful, consuming misery. And I have decided to write this on one of those days so I don’t sugar coat i or gloss over the REAL issue. Because I’ve googled so many articles about this and if I’m honest, none of them are. Honest I mean. They touch upon the subject but cover the pages with excuses for why they feel that way and how they should be lucky they have a child, healthy, and of the opposite gender they wanted but they love them so much anyway… All the articles follow the same pattern. So I’m writing one that doesn’t so that someone like me can read something like this and for once just feel ok about it not being ok. About the simple injustice that they didn’t get what they wanted. And that’s actually ok. And not acting ungrateful or spoilt or worse – shameful.

I have two healthy boys. And yes, as we all say, I am lucky and therefore that should be the end of it. But I wanted a different family, in my mind I wanted the “perfect” family of a boy and then a girl. I am one of two, my brother being the eldest. Traditional. Ideal. Perfect. We see this image of this 2:4 family in brochures, films, cartoons, toy packaging. the list is endless. And why do i know this? Because I see it everywhere. To me it is a constant reminder that there’s the dream I almost got but didn’t. (Told you I was having a bad day didn’t i). For me, it’s got to the point that I now actively look at other families to see if they got my dream and do you know what, most people actually have. Trust me I’ve observed enough families, I know the statistics. And sadly for me, all of my friends got this too. Just me sitting in the corner with my two boys. Everyone else able to discuss dresses, shoes, dance classes, and worse, tell me how lucky I am not to have a daughter because girls are so much harder. My mum makes comments about how I would have only argued with a daughter anyway because that’s how we spent most of my teenage years. Friends tell me they couldn’t imagine me with a daughter now anyway. And those comments haunt me. They physically hurt. And they make me feel like I wasn’t worthy of this foolish dream I had, I am not good enough to be a mother of a daughter. I know that’s not their intention of course, but likewise I don’t think they realise just how deep my grief is for loosing something I never had. I don’t think I really do, but I think I’m at least found the root. 

My dad left my mum and my brother (aged 14months) when she found out she was pregnant with me. The whole of my dads family essentially abandoned us too as it was too awkward apparently so I grew up without a father figure until I was 6. The rest of my mother’s family are all female as there was no grandad (died) and no uncle (also MIA). My poor brother. My mum absolutely struggled to show us any affection and as an adult now I can understand why, but as a child I knew no different and felt that this was of course the reason my dad and his family had left, we were just unlovable children. To my memory, I have never been told “I love you”, definitely never said it and we do not greet each other with hugs and kisses, just awkward acknowledgments. At weddings, births and funerals we still keep our storic stances, no emotions are shown. Though my brother and I now have a great relationship, we actually hated each other when growing up,  my brother confessed under hypnosis when taken to therapy (different story!) that in his toddler brain my mum chose me over my dad as we were never a family of four. I heard this when I was around 16, and from then I was determined that if I were to get married and have a family it would be forever. That I would never let a child feel so unwanted. I tell my husband and children every day that I love them. I hug them, cuddle them, kiss them and spend time listening to them to try and let them know just how much I want them in my life. So even though they are not the set up of children that I wanted, as my two children and people in their own right, they are very much wanted. Needed in fact. And so very loved. But yes I still have a lump in my throat walking in the children’s department past the dresses and sparkly shoes. And looking at the ballet clubs. And seeing mother and daughters on days out. It really hurts.

So I guess I’m a typical daughter from a broken home and traumatic childhood and I felt that by having a family of the same set up it would help me to have another go at having a happy wholesome family, and erase a childhood of pain, neglect and feeling unloved. I really wanted my husband to have a little girl so I could experience what it would be like to be “daddy’s little princess” through her, see how a dad would react to his daughter having boyfriends and watch a daughter become a mothers best friend. Because I didn’t have it and I so desperately wanted it. I wanted to nurture the brother-sister sibling relationship too, the one thing I really do cherish from my experience. This all must sound messed up and actually incredibly selfish. 

So let’s go back to the usual debate written about gender disappointment. I should be so happy and feel so lucky that I have not only one but two healthy children. Yes, I should. And I do. But why then am I still not allowed to also grieve for the life I thought I was going to have or, as I have now come to realise, grieve the life I have actually lived through and that the one chance I had to make it better and heal is not going to happen? I’m not saying that all gender disappointment comes from unloved childhoods or traumatic relationships, but it does come from a dream you didn’t get to make come true, and those regrets don’t go just because you filled the void with something else. There are several stages of grief and perhaps I’m still far away from the final stage, acceptance. I hope I get there soon, but more than that I really hope that if you are suffering gender disappointment please do not feel alone, ungrateful and ashamed. Be kind to yourself on your bad days and proud of yourself on your good.

Today is a bad day. And thats ok.”

Anon.