If It's A Boy

Every day I ride the train with another woman who is pregnant. She and I have had a great time talking about how we feel and what our hopes and expectations are. Yesterday she had a sonogram (she's at 20 or so weeks, a couple months ahead of me) and found out that her baby is a boy. This morning we talked about the idea of wanting a boy or wanting a girl, and the fears that we feel, which are really associated with our own upbringing. My friend is more intimidated at the idea of raising a boy because she had no male siblings. She said, "I know how to raise a girl because I was a girl."

While I would be excited about having a boy or a girl, I feel a little bit the opposite of my friend. I am more intimidated to raise a girl because I was a difficult girl to raise, in many ways. I never got along with my mother while I was growing up, even though my mom was a great parent, very inventive and supportive and cool. All of my friends wished they had a mom like mine. But she and I struggled and struggled. To this day, no single person on earth can make me mad as fast as my mom can. And when I think about being the mother now, to a girl who might be something like I was, I feel a bit of fear. Maybe it was all those years of my mom threatening me with the idea that someday I was going to grow up and have a daughter exactly like me. . .

I am writing a long poem with multiple sections about the sex of our baby, a compilation of all the stories and old wives tales that people tell us, the crazy things they say like if you are tired in the morning you are having a boy. Yesterday I wrote a section about how I imagine it would be to have a boy.

Here it is:

I thought I saw you today
five years from now, counting
the sparkles on Jenny Lake.
At your age I roamed this shore
for pale-bellied frogs to hypnotize.
I perched on dark smooth stones
hunting them, luring the universe.
But you will be so much more, a boy,
conqueror of red-winged blackbirds,
of flat stones skipping, of waves as
even the water lies down at your feet.
Your father bends to teach you
to cast a line, you a descendent
of a long line of sun-kissed fishermen.
He instructs you on the way of cool
shapes along the murky blue bottom,
how the light from underneath makes
a salmon egg dance and glow.
You quiet as if you could be a fish,
hearing his fins push against the water,
the swallowing of silt and green algae.
When I see you the wind rustles aspens
in my heart, my son, O my son.