36 Week Update With #2
I haven’t visited here in a while. And in the past few weeks all I’ve been wanting is to write - to release. I am pent up with anxiety and fear and anger, and through all of that I am still managing to find some happiness intermixed with it. I have feelings. I hate feelings. And yet I am full of them.
I am having a baby girl. When I found out over the phone after a blood test came back, I very obviously cried as I told the nurse “thank you for the news.” I was happy. I just want a healthy child. And then the fear set in. Slowly, at first. Creeping in as the weeks went on, getting stronger and stronger as we near the end. I don’t know what to do with a girl. I have a boy - I know what to do with him. Roar and roughhouse and chase and tickle. Teach him to be a good boy who will certainly grow up to keep his hands to himself and be respectful of others. But a girl?
Fucked if I know.
I have a complicated relationship with my mother to say the least. To say the most: she was abusive; both emotionally and physically and never once have I truly felt loved by her. There are still times when I am having a bad day that I hear her voice tell me I am worthless and stupid; that I should be dead. There were many layers to my postpartum depression after I had my son and she is one of the thickest of them. But I feel like, because he is a boy, our relationship was already different, therefore some of the worry could be taken away.
Now I don’t have that.
I have no idea what it is like to have a good mother. I can’t identify with my friends who go get manicures with their mothers/daughters or go shopping together, or talk on the phone all the time. This is completely foreign to me. And I know that I am not my mother - even when I lose my patience with my son, I am not even a quarter of my mother. It’s just all the ear-worm things she said to me are at the forefront of my mind now that I know I will be raising a daughter. Things like “if you weren’t a girl I wouldn’t have to worry about you so much.” This meant a lot of things. She was afraid I’d be a whore. She was afraid I’d be a lesbian. She was afraid I’d get pregnant. She was afraid I’d get raped (and when I did, told me it was my fault). Apparently a boy could not do any of these things to worry her. Her fear meant keeping me emotionally in a very dark place where I did not believe I was good enough, ever, for a very long time.
I know I won’t make my daughter feel guilty because she is a girl. But I know now what it means to grow up as a girl. To have men leer at you and touch your body with no invitation. To be talked down to and not heard. To work so hard to be who you are to still sometimes being reduced to an object. It is hard to be a woman. And I don’t have any acquired skill or strength to pass down from my mother. Sure, there are the lessons I have learned, but can I teach them? The question lingers.
However.
This baby girl has shown me over thirty-six weeks that she is resilient. She has survived the flu at five weeks. She survived a stomach-virus stint at ten weeks. She made her presence known with her kicks and flutters much earlier than I ever felt my son. Her strength jolts me as she rolls and tumbles and pokes and prods throughout the days and nights. It is amazes me to think what she and I have been through this far along. And sometimes I can’t help but think: it’s because she is a girl.
#pregnancy #pregnancywoes #nerves #anxiety #fear #motherhood