{My thee kids and me, snuggling.}
This afternoon is our twenty-week ultrasound. They will check to make sure baby’s four heart chambers are all properly formed and functioning, that his or her brain and spinal cord look right, and ...
{My thee kids and me, snuggling.}
This afternoon is our twenty-week ultrasound. They will check to make sure baby’s four heart chambers are all properly formed and functioning, that his or her brain and spinal cord look right, and a dozen other things, I’m sure. This always makes me a little bit antsy, as it is the first peek inside and abnormal results can be life-altering, medically speaking. However, more often than not (and in 100% of our past experience) the fetal survey ultrasound has been rather uneventful as far as baby development is concerned. Gender discovery, however, is always an event.
We choose to find out the gender at 20 weeks because I’m not particularly patient, nor have I ever felt an inkling of conviction that not finding out is somehow better for our family. I don’t need a surprise upon delivery or ‘more of a reason to push’ (the notion of which has always made me laugh because Lord help me, I did not need any further persuasion to push than was, uhm, already present).
There is another reason we do choose to find out: sorting out gender preferences.
I have one. There, I said it. I have a gender preference for this baby and I’ve had one for both of my others. Perhaps to some this makes me less of a good person, less of a loving mother, and that is quite alright because frankly I could talk to you about my short comings as a mother from here until Sunday. Not this Sunday but the one after that. This gender preferring just happens to be among them, and what’s worse is that it’s less a gender preference and more a non-preferred gender.
The idea of raising a daughter is severely intimidating to me. Paralyzingly, frightfully so. I know what kind of a daughter I was, and I cower at the idea of having to parent that. I know where my own mom tripped up and how that has effected me into adulthood. In my mind, it feels like more is at stake when raising a daughter and I’m frankly not sure I am up to the challenge.
This is all very non-politically-correct-heart-dump, and I’m sure two-thirds of you are thinking “Allison! What if your (potential) daughter finds these words and reads them someday? Are you sure you want this out there in the interwebs for all eternity?” And yes, I have thought about that two, and my reasoning for sharing anyway is two-fold.
First, many of you have felt this way. Whether it’s about possibly having a daughter or possibly having a son, you’ve felt the preference and you weren’t sure what to do with it. So, here I am holding your hand in solidarity and saying “I’ve felt it too, and you are not alone.”
Second, but more importantly, when I think about my maybe-daughter finding these words some years in the future, my immediate reaction is this: I hope I will have already told her how frightened I was of raising a girl, that we will have talked about that fear, about those lies I believed, and we will have laughed at them. I have to believe, in my mind, that this will all seem silly one day and that having a daughter will knock my socks off, because I know that brokenness is meant to be redeemed, that weakness is meant to be strengthened, that fear is meant to be cast out by blinding light.
What I hold right now in my heart is a little bit broken, a little bit weak, and a little bit afraid, so even if the process of it (raising a girl) freaks me right out, I have to trust that there will be healing.
