As a child, every single one of my dolls were girls. They had the girliest outfits and I relentlessly doted on their hair. All of my baby doll accessories, right down to the hairbrush and bottles with magically disappearing “milk”.....were pink. I find this incredibly interesting as I was not what you would consider an overly girly child myself. I played in mud, with Matchbox cars, and had no problem competing with my older brother regarding who had the best baseball card collection.
Every single childhood daydream about the day I would become a mom, involved me having a girl. I had a plethora of girl names picked out for the day I would bring home my sweet little bundle of sugar and spice. Flash forward many years and imagine my surprise (and fear) when learning my first born was going to be a boy! I had NO idea how to relate to a boy, let alone how I was going to raise one. I knew how to take care of a girl, due to the obvious fact that I am one. I was suddenly faced with a million questions about how to care for such a vastly different type of human being.
In my pre-mom days, I vividly remember making statements such as “My kids will NEVER play with guns.” Parenting naivety clearly ran rampant for me in those days. I even recall making this statement during the first year of my oldest sons’ life, remaining constant that he would not own toy guns. Let me save any future boy moms a little face....your boys do NOT need physical toy guns in order to pretend to shoot. They will instinctively fashion a gun out of anything they can. A stick? Perfect gun. The dog? Change that to canon gun. When they say boys and girls are two entirely different kinds of creatures, they aren’t kidding. Now, as I sit in my home that boasts a Nerf armory wall to hold a slew of boy accouterments and being a recent novice gun shooter myself, I know without a hint of a doubt that I was born to be a mom of boys.
Do I mourn the fact that I did not have the opportunity to put adorable pigtails in hair or buy frilly Easter dresses? Sometimes. Do I wish I had a daughter to get pedicures with, with whom I would help pick out a wedding dress one day and whose face I could wipe the tears from after her first broken heart? Again, sometimes. But it’s almost as though a higher power definitely knew I was far more cut out to be a boy mom than a girl mom. Because of the kind of mom that I am, I would have supported a daughter of mine to the ends of the earth, but had she become interested in joining a cheer squad, I would have despised life. There are just some things that cause me to express a huge “whew” when I think about having to miss out on them. That one in particular being a huge one. I will take trudging through creeks and carrying home a backpack full of rocks to add to our already immense collection, over the prospect of being a cheer mom in a heartbeat.
I live and breathe by the fact that I was the very first love of my boys’ lives. I will never forget the way they followed me everywhere I went and how they both stared at me with a look of pure and genuine love. Sure, this happens with all kids and moms, but there is just something phenomenal about the bond between a mother and son. I am completely content with trading the chance to dress a girl in cute tights any day, for the acknowledgment that I was the first big love of my boys’ lives.
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