Significant others

A friend of mine who had a boy, then a girl, was once discussing with me how lovely it was to have a daughter. She had been thrilled to have a son, of course, but what a relief to have a girl. “Boys are so… other”, she said. I hadn’t really felt that myself, and became increasingly annoyed throughout my third pregnancy, when people told me (often in front of my sons) “a girl would be nice”. Part of it was to do with the assumption that it is fun to have a mix, but I think some women do feel that a daughter is easier to relate to, and that sons are… other.

I was the other way round. I’d never been a girly girl. I had one dolly, given to me by a godmother, and I hated it. I never played with it, and I remember feeling a certain scorn for girls who did like playing with dollies. The same went for Barbie; I never owned even one. I had an older sister obsessed with pink and, fed up with pink hand-me-downs, I staked out blue as my favourite colour.

When I had sons, I found it easy to get into playing trains. I confess to relishing the challenge of creating a wooden track using all the different junctions and bridges we have accumulated over the years. I have become strangely fascinated by JCBs, I enjoy building Bionicles, and I’m quite partial to a light sabre fight.

When I had a daughter, I felt a little daunted by the whole idea of girly play, never really having practised it very much in my own childhood. I’ve tried my best. I have learnt to enjoy lining up small plastic things with over-sized heads that look like aliens but are marketed as Littlest Pet Shop animals. I’ve spent hours fiddling around with pieces of velcro the size of a lentil, in order to dress Barbie in microscopic fabric shapes that she thinks are clothes (doesn’t she have anything between her moulded plastic ears, for heaven’s sake?). I’ve had more pink in my laundry than I would agree to under torture. I have my hair done regularly by a small-fingered hairdresser standing on the chair behind me, as the only way to get a fair run at writing a blog post.

It’s a good thing we are designed to be flexible. It’s amazing how “other” you can become, when needs be.