Without me even knowing it, I’ve become a member of a club. It’s a pretty exclusive society with celebs such as Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman among its patrons. Victoria Beckham was recently accepted after years of trying for membership. Beyoncé is on the waiting list.
Apparently I’m a SMOG – a Smug Mother of Girls. We’re quite the trending topic on the internet after doctors reported an increase in women wanting a girl. Add to that a dubious survey that claims two-daughter families are the most harmonious and I’m starting to look like a stuck-up cow. Especially when DMOBs (Defensive Mothers of Boys) reckon SMOGs are judgmental of their boys’ behaviour.
“I know too many mothers of girls,” sniffs one blogger, “who truly believe that boys are unpleasant, noisy, smelly creatures who take the look off the place and get in the way.”
Oh dear. I did once reprimand a friend’s son as he erected a pulley system out of a rope and buckets in my frangipani tree. But I wasn’t bothered about his boy-ness; I was impressed with his ingenuity and directed him to another tree – an ugly thing that my husband insists on keeping. I also told off his sister for using the furniture as an obstacle course (kids think I’m a horrid old bat).
Naturally, I’m affronted at being thought of as smug. I am, at times, but not due to my skill at producing girls. Not only did that have nothing to do with me, but I like boys and would loved to have had a son (in addition to, not instead of my daughters).
Raising a girl in our increasingly feminised society is largely pre-scripted – “You can be anything, blah, blah” – but navigating a boy through this new world order is more nuanced, more thoughtful. Fortunately, friends let me share in their son’s stories: an 11-year-old Hamish Blake in the making; a trainee soldier whose masculinity makes his mum glow every time he returns home; a red-headed godson as headstrong as his fabulous mum.
More concerning than the boy vs girl debate is our increasing preoccupation with gender. On the day we brought our second daughter home, a neighbour leaned over the fence and said, “S’pose you’ll be going for a third.”
While I try to understand what some say is a deep maternal desire to have a child of a particular gender, I can’t help thinking it’s deeply disrespectful to the mysterious and tenuous miracle that is childbirth. Two of my dear friends have had nine miscarriages between them; what they wouldn’t do to will those babies back. Another with a stillborn son simply wanted a baby who breathed.
To focus on the outcome of the 23rd pair of chromosomes is to dismiss the other 22 – the wondrous alchemy of two sets of DNA threaded together to form traits which are both recognisable and so deliciously new. In our youngest, I see my husband’s extraordinary facility for accents, and yet she’s also been bequeathed a resilience so entirely her own.
Our parents’ generation didn’t over-think gender. They certainly didn’t suffer what’s now psychologically recognised as ‘gender disappointment’. My arrival was followed by the birth of two boys, so our mum didn’t fuss with pink; dungarees in a fetching shade of mustard were a far more suitable hand-me-down. If you had four boys, didn’t you have the best footy team in the neighbourhood?
Call me a SMOG if you must, but here’s my last word: Periods.
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