Gender Benders
When my son was born, his Dad whooped and blurted out, "A son! I've got a son!" I had kind of figured I was going to have a son because during an ultra sound on his due date (he was two weeks late, like my first daughter - my second daughter was only one week late, which always made her seem one week early) the doctor asked, "Do you want to know the baby's sex?" And I said, "No." To which he asked, "What do you have now?" And I said, "Two girls." At which point the nurse pointed to something on the screen and they both chuckled and he said, "My advice is to get ready for something a little different."
Anyway, I was relieved when I had a son because I had my doubts about three girls getting along as well as my two girls already did (for some reason 3 girls always ='ed bad in my mind - I pictured two playing happily burying the third in the sand or tying her to a tree in the woods or cutting off all her hair and gluing it to her face) - so I was happy to have a boy be the third wheel because I pictured a boy holing up in his bedroom reading quietly like my brother had always done in our household of females.
Anyway, daughter number one didn't care at all about the new baby, but daughter number two cared a lot. Too much. So much so that she sat on my knee while I breastfed him keeping watch and would ensure the door was tightly closed when I put him up for his nap and carefully take away his soother and suck on it herself to make sure he didn't acquire any nasty habits in his infancy. She also liked to rock him in his chair - a lot - so that it eventually had to be put on the floor and surrounded by cushions...
But before too long, she figured out that he was good for playing with, unlike her sister who preferred a more sedentary toddlerhood, and they became buddies of a less intense kind and I felt like I could turn my back on them for a few minutes at a time while she played and he crawled around trying to grab at her toys.
My father-in-law, meanwhile, was thrilled with his grandson and took to buying the sorts of toys that we hadn't bothered with for the girls (we hadn't bothered with much, really - almost everything was given to us by people only too happy to get rid of it and since they were girls, it was mostly girl stuff we ended up getting). Trucks, mostly. He bought a lot of trucks for his grandson (the only one, so far). And anything that made a lot of noise. After a while, I noticed anything that didn't make a noise, could be made to make a noise by bashing it over and over into a wall.
This was new to us, this noise thing, because until my son, we didn't have anybody making noise just for the sake of making noise. So the girls would cover their ears and yell, "Make him stop!" and I felt for them but I also thought, "Hm, he's a boy - maybe he needs to make noise." and I'd send him downstairs to where his Dad would be playing electric guitar to bash his truck over and over into the wall.
Eventually, though, his Dad would come up the stairs with his ears covered, "Make him stop!" and I realized it wasn't gender making the noise, it was just one little boy and I took to hiding the trucks that made the noisier noise and leaving around softer toys for bashing into the wall over and over and over - including the odd Barbie who for some reason was not liked by daughter number two (like I said, daughter number one didn't play - she observed, assessed, processed, retained or discarded based on some sort of personal values calculation) and could be spared for a good wapping over and over against a wall.
But then he stopped making noise and discovered video games and there isn't a parent alive who won't admit that boys and video games go together like girls and, well, there's just nothing that goes with girls the way video games go with boys. There just isn't. Is it the games? Is it the boys? Which is it? Because it's definitely a gender divide - there's just no getting around that bit o' sexist fact.
