Our New Baby's Gender

This evening, we should learn the gender of our new baby, unless of course he or she is very shy or modest. However, I'm surprised at how much emotion this is bringing out of me, mostly of the worrying or anxious sort.

I think I want another boy. I say that because teenage girls terrify me. My wife and I raised her younger sister N from age 13 into college, and it was the most difficult time of my life. I tried very hard, but I had a great deal of difficulty relating to N, and that added to an already stressful situation. Of course, on an intellectual level I realize that there are lots of reasons for the difficulty of those times, including our unreadiness to parent, the natural difficulty of the sister/parent and brother-in-law/parent dichotomies, the simple unusualness of the situation, and our three personalities. It really should tell me very little about how it would be for me to raise a little girl up from a baby, always under our rules and value system, and with the consistent parent-child relationship. And still I am scared of girls. I guess emotions do not have to rational.

At the same time, I think I'll feel a little guilty if we're having a boy, as if I somehow wished my daughter out of existence. And, in truth, I might be a little sad. Right now, we have no plans for a fourth child - in fact, we plan on this being our last - and I have images in my mind of teaching my little girl to play softball and tea parties and lots of cuddles in front of movies.

So, I really don't know what I want, which makes me very grateful that I cannot choose and that the matter is already decided. As I told my wife S last night, I really have no way of knowing if I truly love being a father of boys, or just a father of my boys. If it's the latter, which is certainly possible, I should love just as much being a parent of my next child, whoever he or she may be.