RightNation.US: Why Am I So Glad About Having a Boy? - RightNation.US

This is in response to the article "Why Am I So Sad About Having a Boy?" by Jen Glan of NYMag.com. As a Conservative, I fully understand the responses she got from my fellow Conservatives to her complaints about having a boy.

And yet, I understand where she is coming from . . . to a point. Where she loses me is when she promotes feminizing her little boy with pink ballet shoes and girly baby clothes. With that out of the way, I want to talk about the areas where I can relate.

When I was a little girl, of my five sisters, the one I most admired and wanted to be like and be liked by was the one born just before me. Four years older than me, she didn't like playing with me very much because of our age difference. But my mom would make her play with me sometimes anyway because I wanted to play with her so badly.

One of the games that we would play was mommy to our babies and our babies were our dogs. We would dress our dogs up in clothes and pretend they were our babies. We both wanted the girl doggy because of the cute girl clothes that we could put on her. Unfortunately, we only had one girl dog so one of us would have to play with the boy dog. Since my sister was lowering herself to play with me, she insisted on always being the one to play with the girl dog. So it made me sad that I never got to dress up the girl dog in girl clothing.

I know this sounds silly but when I got pregnant I was hoping to have a girl just so I could dress her up in girly clothes. I wanted to buy the pretty little dresses and bows for her hair. I dreamt of how I would brush her hair for hours and put it in pigtails and all sorts of hairdos. I know this is not what is important in life but it is fun and was a big dream of mine.

Plus I was a bit of a feminazi back then but that comes later in this story.

So when I found out I was having a boy, there was a moment of disappointment. I was thinking once again I don't get to play dress-up with my little girl. Yeah, I was feeling sorry for myself over something that I knew I should be ashamed of for even thinking. But there it is. I had those feelings.

Fortunately for me, I got over it pretty quickly and despite myself, I could not stop myself from loving my baby boy who was still in my belly even though I was pro-abortion at the time and he was only supposed to be just a blob of cells and not a human.

I spoke to him all the time before he was born and got to give him the name I had always dreamt of giving a little boy. The funny thing is that I never had a little girl's name in my head already picked out.

On the day he was born, I was fussing with the anesthesiologist because I thought he was trying to knock me out instead of just providing oxygen. And my son was crying as well but as soon as they placed him in my arms, we both quit fussing and looked at one another staring into each other's eyes. Because of how he was looking at me, I told him so this is your mommy on the outside.

The love that I had for that little boy was explosive. I could not imagine that kind of love was possible. I mean, I loved my mom and dad like there was no tomorrow and I loved my husband at the time but there are no words to explain how much I loved that little boy and still do.

Plus I did get to dress my son up really cute because that was the time when OshKosh B'gosh had started making boy clothes that were adorable.

Then there was the incident during our hospital stay where the staff tried to give me a baby girl by accident of course. While I had previously wanted a girl, all of those desires obviously did not matter anymore because when I looked at that baby's face and saw it wasn't my son, then looked at the baby's bracelet and saw that it was pink, I instantly told the nurse this was not my baby, bring me my son.

As for how my feminazi ways affected my raising of my son, I tried to push some of those beliefs onto him but he was so all-boy that he resisted and would not let me. I would constantly talk about women being smarter than men and he loved showing me just how smart he was.

Now when my daughter-in-law became pregnant and I found out she was having a girl, I was thrilled to death that I was finally going to have the little girl I had always wanted. And this beautiful granddaughter of mine is all-girl and loves all things pink and girly. She likes cars too thanks to my car-loving son and I thoroughly enjoyed buying her first car though of course it was pink.

But when my second grandchild was on the way, I was hoping beyond hope that it was a boy because I wanted my daughter-in-law to experience the joy of being a mother to a son. While I have not had the experience of being a mother to a daughter and I'm sure I would have loved it, there is just something so special about the bond between a mother and her son.

I suspect or at least hope Jen Glan is going to learn the lessons I learned about men by becoming a mother to a son. My son taught me that all these beliefs I had about men being so different than women when it came to emotions were all bunk. While yes there are major differences between men and women, and yes the majority of us have different motivations and different automatic thought processes, when it comes to what matters, we are all the same.

We all want to love and to be loved. We all want to take care of our families and care about what happens to our family members. We all want to do everything that we can to protect those that we love. We all want a future for our descendants that is greater than what we lived. We may have different beliefs about how to get there but we do all want our children to have peace of mind, purpose and joy in living.

Men are not the enemy and they are not the cause of all that is bad in the world. Yes, there are bad people but they are not limited to one gender.

Men are wonderful and they are needed by society, by women and by our children to complete the picture and to finish the story.

Elusively yours,
ilja