Yes I know. I was not blessed with any girls. I have four sons – but hoped each time for a tiny baby daughter, and at the start of each pregnancy I called my belly and the little bean it held: Mary-Meghan, Kaitlyn Elizabeth, Emily Rose, and Isabella Jayne. All the way up to the ultrasound appointment that proved these ultra feminine names inappropriate when each successive little bean turned out to be very clearly a little boy. It’s not that I preferred girls to boys – I just started out yearning for what I knew. I was close to my own mother and anticipated enjoying my own daughter in the ways my mother had enjoyed me. With perhaps some improvements.
Not offered as a criticism of my own mother because she was a product of her era, as I am a product of mine, but I thought that perhaps I’d spend less time concerned with what my daughter looked like and would instead focus on the contents of her head, and her heart. I would , I thought, encourage my daughter to be brave, and to be less concerned about what other people thought of her . I would teach her to be more assertive and less polite. I would teach her to identify and express all of her emotions especially the difficult ones, so she would spend less time engaged in lonely weeping, trying to drown unpleasant feelings in chocolate ice cream. Because I know from intimate experience that managing emotions this way is a dangerous and slippery slope . I would , I thought, open the dialogue about relationships and sex and intimacy as early as was developmentally appropriate, which in my opinion is just after birth. So there would be no attendant shame, and so when she was old enough to have real complications and issues I would be her go-to person, in lieu of her seeking advice from an equally naive and clueless friend. But of course I’d get to do all the girl things – the hair and makeup and fashion advice. The planning of 16th birthday parties , and baby showers. The wedding dress shopping . All the frilly and flouncy girly stuff. All the stuff that frankly made me recoil as a girl. Because I understood from my own mother-daughter experience, my girl would likely be very different from me in some very elemental ways.
My mother was beautiful. She was born beautiful and became even more so as she blossomed . She was graceful and effortlessly elegant . I conversely was not so gracefully put together . And I am still working on the elegant. I was cute rather than beautiful and sort of solidly assembled; and nothing has really changed there. I liked dogs and mango trees , fishing for parrot fish off the jetty, diving for shells . I loved boats and planes- a legacy of being raised in a houseful of pilots and mariners . I had a little boat with yellow oars called “Dinghy Daisy” that I spent hours and hours in, pretending to be a pirate, or Jacques Cousteau. But I think, no I am entirely certain , that although who I turned out to be was not what my mother would have chosen as her feminine ideal of “daughter,” she loved me absolutely and regardless. And we got better at being us as we got older . She stopped trying to force the square peg that I was into the round hole of her expectations (well- very rarely) and I stopped trying to continually underscore what I perceived as my differentness and ceased lambasting her with my contempt for her traditional values (again, almost never.)
But it was not to be- or so I thought, as I birthed boy after boy after boy after boy, that I would ever raise a girl.
And my how I surrendered myself to being the mother of boys. It was a rough and tumble life but not quite as rough and tumble as one might imagine. All of the boys played at least one sport and I loved being a soccer mom and team parent, though I was a less than stellar football mother, being unable to follow the game. They were more musical, artsy, creative, history/science/sci-fi nerd kinds of boys. And we lived and are living a sort of a dinosaur museums-auditions-performances-broken G-string-Luke I am your Father-can’t find my dance shoes-Winter is Coming-Siege of Leningrad-One Ring to Lead Them All- kind of life. And this continues to suit me extremely well. I know the difference between a sauropod and a theropod, an X wing and a tie fighter, cried on the beaches of Normandy last summer, and while watching the Red Wedding. Thanks to my screen writer to be child I no longer find director Wes Anderson to be off kilter and strange . So it was, and is, good. I am fulfilled and continually entertained and harbored no yearnings for mothering girls, and in fact I daily convinced myself that save my godchild Felicia, I had no particular affinity for adolescent females. That was- until.
Until I started working as the high school English teacher at a psychiatric hospital. I was originally hired as the elementary teacher but my boss urged me to try secondary English with the understanding that if I hated it some other posting would be found. So I began that first year with trepidations. My upper high school class was comprised of almost all girls- ages fifteen to seventeen, and they were not predisposed to like me, or to be impressed with me in any way. Some of them had been students of the teacher I replaced – an excellent teacher by all reports, who was tough yet maternal and sported a heavy Brooklyn accent. I was definitely nothing like her, and the girls were resentful and sometimes openly hostile. They questioned my accent, my ethnic origins, my immigration status, and my fitness to teach English. And I questioned my fitness too. I has received my stamp as “highly qualified “ in English and Language Arts by a hodgepodge amalgam of A level literature credits, some college classes in poetry and creative composition, and a portfolio of my own writing – and the accreditation secretary granted highly qualified status stamp of approval with a verbalization akin to “ok- I guess.”
So with my dubious qualifications I started with what I knew and prepared to force feed the children a diet of the classics I knew and loved- Dickens, Austen, Bronte, and Shakespeare. But I had underestimated these young people – there was no force feeding required. I looked on in amazement as they connected to the texts much the way I had myself when their age. And this led to discussions and analysis and forays into writing and it was amazing and inspiring; the changes that I saw wrought in them as they embarked on a journey of self discovery through literature- some pieces hundreds of years old- as we pondered universal questions and universal truths. And somewhere in there we also covered how to handle split ends, the vagaries of fashion, coming out, covering our mouths when we yawn, relationships, intimacy, and the paradox that is the human male. I did not need to teach them assertiveness. Instead I tried to teach a little temperance. And that they needn’t be perfect to be perfectly lovable, and that they were deserving of much more respect and tolerance that they had been given thus far in their short lives. And I didn’t need to lecture them on being brave. Through what they shared with me personally and through what I read in their case histories, I discovered that these little ladies had already been called upon to show more courage than I’d ever had to. So there were lessons learned all round and some of those were for me.
It was an amazing year, followed by six more good years, but I never again had a collection of students as talented or sensitive or insightful. I fell in love with my job that year and felt blessed to teach the books I love in the language I love to these girls, whom I absolutely loved, and who made me so proud. They made me wistful, these daughters of my heart, with longing again, for just one little girl.
Raising Cain 