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'Gender disappointment'
'Gender disappointment': Coping with the 'wrong' baby
By Jessie Hewitson
You hope for a girl but learn it's a boy. Jessie Hewitson reports on 'gender disappointment'.
When friends congratulated me on my pregnancy and asked whether I was hoping for a boy or a girl, my reply was always the same: I had no preference. It turns out not to have been among my most self-aware of responses – something I discovered during the 20-week scan.
We decided we wanted to know the sex and when the time came, the scanographer announced we were having a boy. I felt a jolt. For the very first time I realised I had been utterly and completely convinced I was having a girl – and, truth to tell, I did have a preference after all.
Walking out of the hospital in a bit of a daze, I felt a confusing mixture of emotions: on the one hand it was a thrill to find out more about our baby; on the other I experienced a brief stab of disappointment, followed by a flood of guilt.
I spoke about my reaction to friends who had recently had children. All five admitted that they had hoped for girls. One who had found out the sex before the birth cried for two weeks when she knew it was a boy – she had felt too ashamed to tell me at the time and still feels very guilty at the thought of it.
This shame factor means that most women talk about the their feelings of disappointment anonymously on parenting websites.
These range from mild shock to more difficult emotions – many report breaking down in tears during their scan. One blogger at the extreme end of the scale considered terminating her son, had she been able to without anyone knowing.
Geraldine Holden, content editor of Mumsnet, says "gender disappointment" is a popular topic, with more than 400 threads, some running to hundreds of posts each.
"Very often the women posting feel desperately guilty and say they wish they hadn't found out the sex before the birth," she says.
In the experience of psychologist Graham W Price, women generally want to have girls, while men's preferences can go either way.
"Gender disappointment can affect fathers just as much as mothers," he says. "In fact, it often takes men longer than women to get over their regret, as there is a biological imperative for women to bond with their children."
The reasons people prefer one sex to another are varied, but you don't need to be Freud to work out what might be going on with me. I went to a single-sex school and was brought up in an all-female home – we used to joke that even our pets were female.
Price explains that many of us assume we understand, or can relate to, one sex better than the other. We might also have a stereotyped view about boys and girls. People's relationships with their parents and early experiences of men and women in general can also have an impact.
"I've treated a woman who has a son she has never really managed to bond with because she wanted a girl," says Dr Alex Yellowlees, medical director of the Priory Hospital in Glasgow. "It's so sad. Inevitably, it all comes out when the children are older and find out they weren't wanted or valued. It's terribly damaging."
Such examples are rare, however, and the majority of mothers give birth to babies they wouldn't change for all the world, regardless of their gender.
Thankfully I have now got over my initial disappointment. In factI think there is something rather wonderful about introducing a much-needed boy into my matriarchal family.
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Originally Posted by Prisoner Of Ice
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