"I'll Die If I Never Have A Girl!"

Children are not Pokemon, y'all.

Let me start with two quick anecdotes for ya.

Years ago, I went to this camping/hunting weekend with some guys. I am good at neither of those things, although I can drink beer around a fire, so I had that going for me. One of the guys there, who I did not know that well, had five girls. Him and his wife wanted a boy. I think his dad owned a bunch of car dealerships in and around Paris, Texas (“the other Paris”), so he was doing OK financially. Around the fire, we asked him: “Well, can’t you adopt?” He said, with a straight face: “If we adopted, we’d never love the boy like we love the girls.” Hot damn.

Here’s №2.

I had a neighbor years back who had a girl, and the whole family minus the husband was estrogen-laden. Even the dogs were female. They wanted a boy. She came to a book club we hosted, hammered as shit (I mean slugging white wine out of a massive cup) and would have her eyes roll in and out and drunkenly purr, “I can’t wait till we (hiccup) get our boy.” That was at the very beginning of our infertility bullshit. At the time, I laughed to myself and thought, “This train wreck ain’t ever ‘getting her boy.’” That boy is now walking the Earth.

Even as these situations were happening, before I realized I’ll probably never have a biological child and that can inherently destroy lots of other life elements for you —

— I never understood this whole narrative about “getting your girl” or “getting your boy” or such a strong desire to be the mom/dad of one specific kind of gender. Like, what the fuck is happening here? Are children Pokemon? Do you need to “collect ’em all?” I could obviously see how a dad having a son, or a mom having a girl, would be more palpable. I totally get it, but like … why do we need to talk about it so much?

Part of the issue here is — well, the issue is manifold. Let me chop down a few for you:

1. We have an entire digital industry related to pregnancy and birth now: Gender reveal parties. The gender fake out! Showers and sprinkles. Birth announcements! Even 25 years ago, women told their friends and their mom and their grandma and maybe 2–3 cursory non-coworkers knew before the baby arrived. Now if you do something “creative” with blue spray paint, the entire world may know about your pregnancy before the kid even comes Earth-side. That’s a big shift, and I think people thus lean into the performative aspects more than they should.

2. Parenting as a destination, not a journey: In part because of Instagram, and in part because of increasing infertility and “Spermageddon,” sometimes when people get through and become parents, they’re so relieved after so much bullshit (oh, multiple miscarriages would count here) that I think they view parenting as the final destination, as opposed to realizing they just signed on for the rest of their life. That can also lead to performative stuff.

3. “This is the type of stuff I see posted:” So then people want to post it too. Performative recognize performative.

It’s a tricky topic to walk because obviously you don’t want to downplay how someone feels. If they are legitimately depressed that they keep conceiving boys, OK, well, that’s a real emotion and you need to acknowledge that. At the same time, this is an utterly distasteful type of content considering how many women cannot have kids, go through infertility, fail at IVF, miscarry like crazy, see all their friends get knocked up, etc. It’s very disheartening that you would post stuff like this, even if you feel it.

Also, what happens in 12 years when your son sees this content and realizes, “Oh shit, my mom was telling her followers that she couldn’t love me?” Isn’t that going to be … um … kind of fucked up?

It’s easy to read this article and think, “Oh, this kid can’t knock up his wife, so he’s bitter and writing this.” Nice take. You get that psych degree from Grand Canyon University? I love it. Although, the diploma on the wall is a little crooked. Anyway. It’s partially that, absolutely. But it’s more like, children are unique beings to be loved and cherished and developed, even if they want to change genders in 20 years or whatever. Wailing about “not getting your boy” misses kinda the entire point of parenting.

Am I off here?