
Does this picture make you go "aaah" or "AARGH!"?
I’m still incensed by the Eight Boys and Wanting a Girl Cutting Edge TV documentary. And I still don’t get it. Mothers with a parade of gorgeous, healthy boys drinking cranberry juice, douching with diluted vinegar, and avidly reading online conception websites to see how many women managed to conceive a girl following such methods as using lime-soaked tampons, or having sex two days before ovulation. Others went still further, flying to America to try their luck with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), something that’s illegal in the UK, unless trying to prevent inheritable diseases. Some of these mothers seemed fraught to the point of derangement, sobbing at baby scans that revealed ‘another boy’ and regretting a life without shopping trips and helping choose a wedding dress. At the extreme end of the scale were tales of abortions, adoptions and post-birth Prozac.
Are boys really so bad?
Having a family, and deciding on the number of children you have, is clearly a lifestyle choice. Likewise, how you bring up your children is also up to you. But having a child so you can go shopping with her seems a strange priority. For every father who is overjoyed to have a little footballer in the family, there’s probably another sitting glumly on the terraces, while Tom, Dick or Harry takes himself off to learn modern dance. Who says a daughter is going to want to spend her days having facials? She might actively take against pink – especially if her mother is so keen to be girly. While most parents love their children unconditionally, that’s not to say they’re going to share the same interests.
Of course, I might just be taking the documentary far too personally. I have three boys, and the morning after watching Eight Girls and Wanting a Boy I was booked in for a 12-week scan for baby four. During my last pregnancy, I lost count of the number of people who asked me if “I was prepared for another boy”, and “Will you keep on going till you get a girl?” I’m now dreading telling anyone I’m pregnant, because the remarks are likely to be worse fourth time around. I discovered that laughing it off with a, “Pretty pleased with the boys I’ve got, thanks” made me sound defensive. Other times, after another night of pregnancy nausea and barely sleeping with the two existing children, I was less composed. Once I even said to a particularly annoying mother of three girls, “The scan couldn’t pick up on the gender – it might be a hermaphrodite”.
This desire for girls can’t just be about creating shopping companions. There seems to be a widespread malaise about boys. Research commissioned last year for Women in Journalism revealed very few positive news stories about teenage boys, while male pupils are lagging further and further behind their female classmates at school. Books such as Raising Cain and Real Boys reveal problems with young male psyches caused by narrow definitions of the ‘right’ way to behave. In a classroom, this translates as boys as young as four and five being labelled as problematic, when all they’re doing is finding it hard to sit down because their bodies are telling them to run around.
So, for the record, I genuinely don’t care if my fourth baby is male or female. I’m told the odds of having a girl after four boys are very low. Well, fine by me. My house is regularly turned upside down by jumping, running and kicking boys. They scrap, are obsessed with pirates and Lego, and don’t shirk away from mud. But they also help me bake cakes, paint endless pictures, and love being read to. Admittedly, they don’t like shopping, but the plus side is that getting them dressed takes about two seconds because none of them care about what they wear. Are girls the same? I’m unlikely to find out, but do know that healthy children are a blessing, and to be blessed four times over is nothing short of a miracle. Which is why I’ll be happy, whether I get to think pink or not.