I am still trying to wrap my head around this. Baby #2 is a boy. Holy shit. I don’t know why but never I never expected to have a son. Never. Not ever. “Oh you’re a girl dad! Oh you are going to be the best girl dad” was pretty much the only thing I was told from the first moment we let people know Amy was expecting. I never really knew or understood what that meant until the moment I was told “Oh wow it’s a boy”. The feeling of shock and anxiety that went through me in that moment put it all in a new perspective that I am still sorting through two weeks later.
I am going to try to explain my thoughts and feelings the best way I can but with a full understanding that many of them are coming from a place of fear and ignorance and gender roles and all kinds of shit that people will probably judge and look down on but hey, I’m just a dude doing the best I can and so you get to take this ride with me. First things first, I am absolutely psyched to be having a son. I would have been psyched to be having another daughter. I am so thankful that I am going to get to experience the love and growth of this child just like I have with our daughter, and I can’t wait to see what kind of person they end up being. Being a father to my daughter is such an overwhelmingly joyful experience and getting to do it all over again is not something that I am taking for granted.
Now that we’ve established that, goddamn does this hit different. Where did all of this anxiety come from? I should feel more prepared this time around right? I have a whole 18 months of parenting in me right now. I am fresh from the trenches of no sleep and spit up t-shirts. I remember the feelings of fear and shock that were going through me when we walked our daughter out of the hospital in her car seat past all of the nurses and doctors who had helped deliver her. Like this is it? Prove I have a car seat and you let me go? I have no idea what I’m doing. YOU have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never been a parent. How can you just give me this baby? There was plenty of excitement as well, but those were the thoughts bouncing around my mind as we made our way to the car.
Since that time I have not only gained confidence in my ability, but I have gained so much confidence in my ability that I was already telling everyone “oh yeah, we are ready for another one. Two won’t be so bad. We are already in baby parent mode, this will just be more of the same.” In all of these hypotheticals, the “more of the same” that I was imagining was another daughter. The more I’ve reflected on this over the last couple of weeks I’ve realized how dumb this was on multiple levels. Even if it was another daughter, it’s a completely different person. The idea that it would magically be a rinse and repeat type situation was completely flawed from the get go. But if it was another girl at least I would know that I would be girl dad again.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few days over why the idea of being a girl dad was so much easier for me to come to terms with than being a boy dad. There’s no good way to put those feelings into words, but a big part of it is I feel like no matter what I do as a girl dad, she has an amazing mother to look up to and model herself after. As far as being her dad, all I have to do is love her and support her and make sure she feels like she can do anything that she wants to. When it comes to growing up and being a woman, and all of the struggles that would entail, she would have her mom to show her the way. I married the person who I think is the most incredible woman in the world, so I could rest assured that she would have the best person to look up to as she grows. I never really spoke to my wife about this, and it’s probably unfair that I was dumping that responsibility on her, but that was how it worked out in my head.
Now that is suddenly flipped on it’s head and that responsibility to turn this child into a man is going to fall on me. Fuck. I don’t want this baby to turn out like me, I want him to be better than me and I realize now I have no idea how to make that happen. If I knew how to be better than this, I would probably be better than this myself. I have gone through my life with not just a father, but an awesome stepdad who raised me as his son since I was young, and even with him to look up to I don’t think I turned into the man he is. I am 35 years old and I still never figured out how to be the man I would want my son to be. And now he’s coming. I don’t have time to figure it out, and that is terrifying.
So that’s where I’m at at the moment. I hope he doesn’t ever hear that I was worried or anxious about having a son and think I wasn’t overjoyed that he was going to be born. I am. Part of why I think I feel so freaked out is because I am so excited to have a son and I am just so certain I am going to drop the ball along the way. I just don’t want to mess this up. And that’s the other thing too, your kid expects you to have the answers or to know what you are doing when they look to you for answers and right now I feel like I have none. Sorry little guy, I’m working on it though.
