The One Time I Was Really Happy My Kid Spread Their Legs

I never thought the sight of a labia would cause me to burst into tears.  

But two weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning, there I was, with my own lady bits covered in an over-sized paper towel, staring at tiny genitals on a screen and crying.  

We’re having a little girl. 

Of course, I'm sure my reaction would have been pretty similar if we'd been told we were having a son. 

Finding out the sex of your kid is the one time a doctor's answer is a total a win/win situation.

At least, unless the doctor had turned to me and said, “Well, Halle Berry/Sigourney Weaver, it looks like you are going to be birthing our new alien overlords.” And that did not happen. At least not yet. 

I also want to take a moment to say that, of course, I understand that sex and gender are not always linked. If later she tells us she identifies as a he, we’ll be fine with that.  But for now I am just so, so excited about the prospect of raising a daughter. 

Daughter. 

I am  obsessed with the word.  I roll it around in my head all day.   I say it to my wife ad nauseam. That and her name. We aren't sharing it publicly yet, but Cat and I use it daily and it just fills me with delight to be able to talk to her by name.  It makes her feel more real.

 

Well, that and the fact that about the time we found out which name we would be using, she got strong enough to REALLY KICK.

Have you ever been kicked in the vagina from the inside?  

Or had someone used your bladder as a spring board?  

The miracle of life contains a shocking amount of someone else trying to force pee to unexpectedly shoot out of you while you are driving. 

But I love being a private bounce house.  I know not everyone enjoys being pregnant, and there are elements of it that I could live without (the indigestion, the swelling, the giant stomach) but for the most part being pregnant feels a lot like falling in love. 

When I first met Cat I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything that didn’t cause me to think about her, to fantasize about her, to feel an excited rush about when we would see or even just speak to each other again.  Being pregnant with our daughter feels a lot like that. 

I think about her all day, I wonder what she’s going to be like, look like, sound like. I fantasize about holding her and tickling her and talking to her and what all the stages of life will be like, about how heart melting it will be to watch Cat with her. I dream about her. 

I even fantasize about what it will be like when she is a pre-teen and screaming about how much she hates us because she can’t go do whatever ridiculous thing we’ve just said “no” to her doing.

  Everything else in life is lost in a haze that just doesn’t matter as much as my excitement to have her in our life.  I’m smitten already.

 

And now that she has a name and a pronoun, my mind is really honing in on these fantasies. Where before there were scenarios in my mind with a daughter or a son, now it is all our daughter and the very special excitement that comes with raising a girl. 

I feel especially excited that she will grow up around so many empowered women. Both of her mothers work in male-dominated professions (and are pretty awesome). Her Mimi (Cat’s mom) is smart, wonderful and managed to run her own business while raising children: jumping on flights to Houston and back to Denver for meetings before her kids got home from school that day. 

And then there are the adorable pets who will live with her...all of which are also female.

This lady-centric origin story led someone to ask me the question, “Will you bring men over from time to time, to like, let her know that they exist?”

This comes from a nice and very well-intentioned place of concern about the well-being of my child. So I will answer it with care in two parts.

Number One: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, but nope.  No one is going to be invited over to my home as some sort of token cultural exchange educational program. I can’t even with this question. 

Look, our household is way female. I get it.  

But guess what? Most families lack complete, all-encompassing diversity. For some reason, though, only single parents and same-sex parents seem to get bombarded with this kind of “concern” about balance.

Imagine if I said:  “Well, your family is all Caucasian, so did your parents invite over some people of color so you would know they exist? Or some gay people? Or handicapped people?  Do you regularly have people of the Ba’hai faith over for dinner to expose your kid to a variety of religious beliefs? And by that I mean, for the express purpose of “exposing” you to them. Not because, you know, your family actually was friends with or cared about them."

Do not take this to mean that Baby Staggs will not have men in her life. Of course she will. We live on earth.

We have many male friends and Cat has a brother who is pretty much the epitome of masculinity. We’re talking world traveler, bearded, former military, outdoors man who hikes,  and runs marathons in his sleep. He’s also extremely sweet and loving and will be a fantastic and adored uncle, as will my sister’s husbands and many of our friends, with all of their varied genders and backgrounds and ethnicities.   

But these people won’t be around our kid because we want to “expose” baby Staggs to anything.  They will be around her because we love them and they are her family and our friends.

 Yes, I want my kid to have a diverse and full life and to be exposed to all kinds of people and cultures and places and, yes,  we will go out of our way to give her those experiences whenever we can, but a question like that isn’t actually about giving baby Staggs all that life’s banquet has to offer…it’s about pointing out a perceived lack in our family.  A family where she is much loved, much planned for, and much desired by two adoring parents.

This perceived lack brings me to point number two: we live in a patriarchy. Sure, things are way, way better and Cat and I actually both excel in male dominated industries just fine. But Men still rule this world. That is fact.  So, while our daughter may live in a  bubble where the house is controlled by her two mommies, that isn’t going to change the fact that she lives in society as a whole and more often than not she will be taught very subtly that men are the ONLY people who truly matter. Even if I wanted to, I can’t keep her away from that reality, and honestly, maybe a household full of women might slightly tilt the scales to an ALMOST even balance. My hope is that she’ll be a bit more oblivious to the limitations society wants to throw on her. If she can come at the world with all the entitlement that a boy gets, I will feel like I have succeeded as a parent. 

I want to teach her that she can do anything she puts her mind to, as long as she is willing to put in the hard work.

We have amazing and inspiring friends, both male and female, who truly embody the ideals, time and effort that go with doing what you love for the living when settling would be easier. I hope some of that is instilled.

I want to teach her that no one has a right to look down on her for anything beyond her own behavior.  And I especially want to teach her that her girlhood and her womanhood is something to be celebrated and revered. 

I hope that one day, instead of looking at herself the way we teach women to look at themselves,  she will look on her own body in the mirror the same way her Mama and I looked at it in that ultrasound monitor two weeks ago: with awe, admiration and love…but also without being some sort of narcissist. We have enough of those in LA.