So Esther Walker, who hates her unborn son has a husband, Giles (poor Giles).
Let’s pretend that it is Giles who hates the thought of daughter. Here is his story.
Word for word, Esther’s article with the genders reversed. You can read the original article here:
It’s taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn’t a disgusting girl!
By Giles Walker
Please, not a girl,’ I hissed at my brother Harry. ‘If it’s a girl, I’ll just die. I can only deal with one woman in my life… and sometimes that’s one too many.’
I’d just announced my wife’s second pregnancy, and a nagging fear that had started from the moment I saw her positive pregnancy test weeks earlier had grown into a full-blown conviction that I felt ashamed to admit out loud. I really didn’t want a girl.
Please don’t condemn me. I know very little about girls, coming from a family of all boys, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Girls are gross; they antagonize their siblings with words, are obsessed with mirrors, casually destroy local reputations and turn into disgusting teenage girls and then superficial, narcissistic women.
My wife Esther and I already have one boy, 22-month-old Kieran, and this second pregnancy has been so different and so much worse than the first, with horrid morning sickness from the outset, that I was starting to panic that there was something radically different about it, i.e. there was that alternative, dreaded gender in the mix.
There were reasons why I could confess my girl aversion only to my brother. Fathers who declare a gender preference out loud are breaking a huge taboo — the acceptable thing to say is that your only care is that the child is healthy and happy.
If someone is rude enough to press you, you must stare off into the distance with a martyrish look on your face and say: ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to have one of each.’ And then you leave it there.
If you are like Victoria Beckham or Jools Oliver and already have three of one gender, you are allowed to hope for one or the other, but that’s the only situation in which it’s acceptable to have any opinion. Otherwise you are just a bit monstrous and ungrateful — what about all the men who can’t have children at all?
But the truth is I like boys, I understand boys and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a girl. People say how sweet and gentle girls are and how boisterous and messy boys are. But what use is a verbally-manipulative girl to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with boys and their plain speaking. I’m a plain speaker myself. I’m a Grand Master of plain speaking.
But alas, it seems Mother Nature has other ideas. The other day, my wife lay in the sonographer’s office as he moved the ultrasound wand over her already-fat stomach, and my worst fears were confirmed.
‘There are the hands, there . . .’ he said. He moved the wand around for the ‘up-skirt shot’ as my wife calls it. ‘And there are the soles of the little feet,’ he cooed. There was a loaded silence as we both stared at the white gash on the screen between the legs.
‘Oh God, is it a girl?!’ I said, a little bit too loudly.
‘Well,’ said the sonographer. ‘You can’t confirm anything at 12 weeks, you really have to wait to 20 weeks to be sure, but . . . it does look suspicious, doesn’t it?’
I felt light-headed; was the nausea I was feeling from sympathetic morning sickness or horror at the prospect of a woman-child?
Out on the street I reached out for Esther, with a shaking hand. She feels exactly the same as I do. Her adoration, worship, love and fanatical devotion to our son since the day of his birth has made the idea of having a girl unthinkable.
Before we left, Esther had been chasing bees and cats in the park with Kieran, who was wearing a cape (the one with the big silver lightening bolt, and using an assortment of sponge weapons to defend her against monsters, including dragons, flying monkeys and cyclops).
I thought about Ester’s scan and turned to speak to her. “All fine, only one head, in the right place and all that. And, it looks like it might be . . .’ I stalled, praying she would be more enthusiastic about the prospect of a girl than me ‘. . . a GIRL!’
‘Yeah,’ said Esther. ‘Great!’ But I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
She wants only boys in her life, she confessed later. Sweet little boys who will tumble about, kiss her nose and say ‘Love you Mommy’, not little girls with their dramatic sobbing, endless pleas for more shoes, and demands to have their hair curled and their nails painted.
She has been badly affected by a tale she was told by a mother of three girls, describing how she’d spent a beach holiday last year.
‘I was being Sympathetic Mom, listening to petty comparisons amongst girls, complaints about how much other girls weighed, who had the longest hair, legs, eyelashes,’ said the mom. ‘It was exhausting. We were pitched on the beach next to a mom of two boys and she was helping them build an amazing sand castle, while they roughhoused with each other and laughed and threw a Frisbee back and forth. I love my girls but it did look like this gal was having a pretty amazing holiday.’
This story still ringing in her ears, I knew that Esther wouldn’t be any more thrilled than I was about our impending arrival — a fact which made me feel even more guilty.
What is wrong with us? How could I — how could we — be so mean and cold as to have such a strong preference as to the gender of our unborn child? There’s a reason that it’s taboo to admit to these feelings: they are deeply unpleasant.
Yet they are not entirely without foundation.
Neither Esther nor I come from a family of women. Indeed, we are from families of men. I have three brothers. My wife has one brother. My father has two brothers, as does my mother. When casually discussing the issue of fidelity, one Christmas my mother looked up from the historical biography she was engrossed in and said: ‘An affair is out of the question for me; I need another man in my life like I need a hole in the head.’ Then she held out her teacup for a refill.
It is little wonder we are suspicious of little girls. Deeply, deeply suspicious. I once read a survey that had found families with two boys were the happiest and I chose to believe it completely.
It’s not just me. Mumsnet identifies the phenomenon of the SMOB — the Smug Mother Of Boys. They love their little boys and find girls manipulative, deceptive, superficial, shallow and jealous. At playgroups, they will draw their boys closer to them when any girl comes within three feet.
To offset the occasional hardship and boredom of looking after small children, my wife gets in return a little knight whose goal in life is to protect her, like the crazy idealized image of manhood she read in a romance novel.
Little boys, with their own interest in courageous things and willingness to have their armor dented and to wield impressive weaponry, fit in with this ridiculous pursuit of the romantic and the perfect in a way that self-absorbed little girls do not.
For most girls don’t want to do strenuous things like jousting, racing cars, and making up their own chants to march in parade to. They want to berate other girls and whisper snidely, wear 40 outfits in one day, have petty emotional outbursts, tease their friends until someone develops an eating disorder which they can then mock on Facebook.
And, in the end, your girls will leave you for another man. They will get boyfriends, who will only be interested in your girl because she’s a giant slut and hands out blowjobs like mints at the dentist’s office.
These boys might even — horror! — marry your girl and take her, and your grandchildren, away for ever. It is the father of the groom who is the centre of attention, it is the maternal grandfather who traditionally gets the action with the grandchildren. You stand to lose everything!
Yet, despite my fears, rationally speaking, I know I am being unfair. Of all the little girls I know — and I know an awful lot, including my three nieces — I only know two who are really horrid, whom I avoid because they are so spiteful and crazed.
My nieces can be charming with my son, throwing balls to him or bringing him toys they think he might like. They laugh until they cry when he takes a long drink of water and then gasps ‘Ahhh!’
And, by the same token, I know several vile little boys, who snatch and scream and throw tantrums and narrow their eyes at my son and shriek ‘No babies allowed!’ because he is a few months younger than them.
More to the point, there is no getting away from the fact that my new baby is a girl, and I have no choice but to get used to it. I will have to get used to a different nappy-changing experience and accept that there will be a lot more plastic Barbie dolls in the house.
I must put aside my daydreams of Kieran and his little brother holding hands, dressed as knights or superheroes. I will have to get used to the house having much more emotionally charged conflict and being held up in the kitchen with a long diatribe about what a slag Melissa is. I will just have to hope that Kieran and his sister can find things that they like doing together.
This will be helped by the fact that, if I’m honest, Kieran isn’t exactly like the little boys in the Lego Ninjago comics: he won’t let me spike his hair and he’s fond of heading straight to the most enormous, cupcake he can find and licking it.
In fact, while my wife and I might be worried about a little girl spoiling our vision for a rough and tumble, joyful little family with a fondness for all things football, Kieran would probably like nothing better than a baby sister with whom he can play Conquering Mars.
Although if I send her off to playgroup dressed as Batman, that’s my business…
judgybitch 