I wouldn’t consider myself a chauvinist but I admit that I was a tad disappointed when I first learned my wife and I were going to have a girl. Honestly, the prospect frightened me a little. I imagined a room decorated in pink, swathed in rainbows and flowers. Everything would be soft and perhaps frilly with bits of lace.
Even more worrying to my male brain was the prospect that I wouldn’t be able to do the things I’d hoped to do with a son. Games of catch would be replaced with tea parties, Hot Wheels with baby dolls and she’d rather watch My Little Pony over Transformers.
How could I be involved in changing diapers or bath time or something as normal as picking out clothes? How would I be involved in her life? These anxieties floated in the back of my head while I smiled on the outside and joked of looking at shotgun purchases and again getting used to a whole lot more pink.
I’m not even sure why this bothered me so much. I grew up in a house full of women at every stage of life; from my two younger sisters, to the joys of menopause in my mother and beyond with my grandmother. Another female in my life shouldn’t be a big deal and yet, it was. However, I kept my mouth shut about these anxieties because they were ultimately trivial compared to having a baby in the house at all.
Most of the anxieties melted away the moment I held her in my arms. She was so tiny and beautiful and she was my daughter. My daughter. Without much thought, I changed her very first diaper, forgetting all those worries about doing it wrong. I helped with bath time and interacted with her as much as possible. The only thing I found myself excluded from was mealtime but it seemed like such a small matter in the great scheme of things.
Nevertheless, I was mentally preparing myself for when she would grow older and turn her attention to baby dolls and bunny rabbits. That’s when something, in my opinion, wonderful happened. She took an interest in cars. As an infant she always paid attention to the road on our walks but I chalked that up to cars being “big, shiny, moving things”, but then one day at the grocery store, she reached out for a Matchbox car at the checkout stand. Curious as to what she’d do with a car, I bought it.
She instantly treasured the car and played with it constantly for the next few days. That when I knew I had an in. I eagerly picked up a Hot Wheel at every chance and she happily accepted each one. Soon, she was pointing out Beetles and Jaguars and Jeeps! Some days, she would spend hours carefully lining her cars up or categorizing them by color. Other days, we would race and crash them until Mommy complained about the noise (then we’d do it all over again). We began playing racing games together and these days, she has a car collection the 3-year old me would eye jealously. She even steals my off-road magazines.
It began to dawn on my lizard brain that my expectations were just plain stupid. Girls aren’t preprogrammed to “like” stereotypically feminine things. Granted, she adores Hello Kitty just as much as she adores fire trucks but it was wrong of me to preemptively pigeonhole her. In fact, as her father and a man, it’s my duty to assure she grows up to be the woman she chooses to be, not the one the world expects her to be.
Now, we occasionally play catch in addition to holding impromptu tea parties. We sometimes twirl like ballerinas and then pick up our Nerf swords and battle. I shouldn’t have worried about having a son, so much as having the well-rounded child I have today.
Now if only I could get away from all the pink.
