It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!
By Esther Walker
PUBLISHED: 02:05 GMT, 10 December 2012 | UPDATED: 02:06 GMT, 10 December 2012
Please, not a boy,’ I hissed at my sister Harriet. ‘If it’s a boy, I’ll just die. I can only deal with one man in my life... and sometimes that’s one too many.’
I’d just announced my second pregnancy, and a nagging fear that had started from the moment I saw my positive pregnancy test weeks earlier had grown into a full-blown conviction that I felt ashamed to admit out loud. I really didn’t want a boy.
Please don’t condemn me. I know very little about boys, coming from a family of all girls, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Boys are gross; they attack their siblings with sticks, are obsessed with toilets, casually murder local wildlife and turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.
My husband Giles and I already have one girl, 22-month-old Kitty, and my second pregnancy had been so different and so much worse than my first, with horrid morning sickness from the outset, that I was starting to panic that there was something radically different about it, i.e. there was that alternative, dreaded gender in the mix.
There were reasons why I could confess my boy aversion only to my sister. Mothers who declare a gender preference out loud are breaking a huge taboo — the acceptable thing to say is that your only care is that the child is healthy and happy.
If someone is rude enough to press you, you must stare off into the distance with a martyrish look on your face and say: ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to have one of each.’ And then you leave it there.
If you are like Victoria Beckham or Jools Oliver and already have three of one gender, you are allowed to hope for one or the other, but that’s the only situation in which it’s acceptable to have any opinion. Otherwise you are just a bit monstrous and ungrateful — what about all the women who can’t have children at all?
But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them.
It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!
By Esther Walker
PUBLISHED: 02:05 GMT, 10 December 2012 | UPDATED: 02:06 GMT, 10 December 2012
Please, not a boy,’ I hissed at my sister Harriet. ‘If it’s a boy, I’ll just die. I can only deal with one man in my life... and sometimes that’s one too many.’
I’d just announced my second pregnancy, and a nagging fear that had started from the moment I saw my positive pregnancy test weeks earlier had grown into a full-blown conviction that I felt ashamed to admit out loud. I really didn’t want a boy.
Please don’t condemn me. I know very little about boys, coming from a family of all girls, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Boys are gross; they attack their siblings with sticks, are obsessed with toilets, casually murder local wildlife and turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.
My husband Giles and I already have one girl, 22-month-old Kitty, and my second pregnancy had been so different and so much worse than my first, with horrid morning sickness from the outset, that I was starting to panic that there was something radically different about it, i.e. there was that alternative, dreaded gender in the mix.
There were reasons why I could confess my boy aversion only to my sister. Mothers who declare a gender preference out loud are breaking a huge taboo — the acceptable thing to say is that your only care is that the child is healthy and happy.
If someone is rude enough to press you, you must stare off into the distance with a martyrish look on your face and say: ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to have one of each.’ And then you leave it there.
If you are like Victoria Beckham or Jools Oliver and already have three of one gender, you are allowed to hope for one or the other, but that’s the only situation in which it’s acceptable to have any opinion. Otherwise you are just a bit monstrous and ungrateful — what about all the women who can’t have children at all?
But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them.
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