Before my son was born, I never really wanted to have a boy.

It is only now that he is nearly a teenager, only now that I have been utterly in love with him for over a decade, that can I admit, with both embarrassment and astonishment, that before Garth was born, when I imagined raising a boy, it was with more resignation than pleasure. Even after two daughters, I was still secretly hoping that my third pregnancy would yield another girl.

If the truth were known, I wasn't much interested in maleness. My last intense involvement with men had revolved around the rituals of mating, but over the years since I'd chosen a spouse, most of my primary relationships had been with women. I loved my daughters and my stepdaughter and my mother and all my female friends, and although I also loved my husband and my brothers and those male friends I had managed to keep—or make—since my marriage, still, my life was predominated by women. I would have been thrilled to welcome another daughter into my life.

Besides, with a few notable exceptions, I didn't much like the boys I knew. I didn't like the way they blustered through the world with their grubby faces and brash bodies, ignoring everything that did not fascinate them, pushing themselves through space until it sometimes seemed the very air was bruised by their presence. And balls and bugs and trucks—boys seemed limited by their own limited interests. Boys were messier, louder, more destructive than girls. Girls even toilet-trained earlier.

Boys seemed more risky, more of a threat. True, a son was still probably more likely than a daughter to grow up to become a member of Congress or the winner of a Nobel Prize. But the prisons were filled with grown boys. Boys were more likely to suffer from birth defects, learning problems, car accidents, or heart attacks. Boys caused more problems.

In fact, the only reason I could think of for wanting a son was so that my husband could know the same intense sense of continuity that I felt with our daughters. Having girls reconfirmed my link with the generations of women who had proceeded me and with those I hoped would succeed me. Our daughters made me feel connected to my own girlhood and confident about my old age, made me feel integral to both biology and history in a way I doubted would have been nearly so profound if they had been boys. I speculated that having a son would give my husband the same deep satisfaction that our daughters gave me, and yet, back then, I thought it unlikely that a son would affect my life in an equally significant way. Basically, raising a boy seemed like a lot of work.

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