I am grateful for your replies. It has been an interesting thread.
Firstly, for those leaping on those who have expressed similar worries about raising only boys and saying it won't help me, to be honest it helped me more to read than the insistence that boys are just the same, no difference, nothing to see here thank you.
For those worried about my DS - it's fine. I love him. Of course I do. That's largely the problem!
He is 18 months and he enjoys Thomas the Tank Engine, animals, ice cream and cuddles.
When he's five he will probably enjoy some random superhero thing, ice cream, books and cuddles.
When he's fifteen I don't know what he'll enjoy but that's as true as a girl and hopefully he'll still enjoy ice cream and cuddles.
It's when he's twenty five, thirty five, that the relationship is severed a little. I don't see that as a bad thing. In fact it's normal and natural. Hard to explain really.
So some people are adamant that their kids aren't their friends. I think my parents had that attitude some of the time, it wasn't really a barrel of laughs to be honest. Obviously, sometimes you have to discipline them, confiscate their phones and so on ... but (especially as they get older) I really hope my son and any other children I may have know I've got their back and they can tell me things and I will try to help. And also, when they are adults, do you say "Right! Well, I'm no longer your parent in the active sense of the word, obviously you're not my FRIEND, so tootle off, as I've got my friends and you've got yours!"
Some - most - of my friends are friends with their mums, and sisters.
I am the daughter of a daughter/son combination. I was actually always closer to my dad growing up as my mother was not very stable. One minute she'd be cuddling me and telling me I was beautiful and lovely and how much she loved me, the next she'd be screaming in my face saying she was ashamed of me and that someone else's daughter was cleverer/prettier/more talented. I never felt comfortable with her and she could be very verbally cruel which scared me when I was little, then upset me, and finally turned into contempt.
Then she died. I was sad for her. I was sad she hadn't had a happier and longer life. But I felt no sense of personal loss or grief, no sense of anything really. I think on some level, very deep down i think, I was relieved. Things had been so volatile, she'd been drinking so heavily, screaming insults at me, humiliating me - she knew a number of teachers at the school I went to as she worked there herself and she used to pass on staffroom "gossip" but she'd twist it so it sounded about me personally. There was a trend for girls to wear heavy knitted cardigans under their blazers and she told me a teacher I liked and admired had said I looked like the Incredible Hulk. It turned out she hadn't said that at all. My mum herself had said something about all the girls looking like the hulk and this teacher had made "hmm yeah" noises. That sort of cruelty.
So that's an example but you can maybe see what I had to live with. And this was daily. I had always loved my dad and i think i thought a life with him, a peaceful life with me the devoted daughter comforting my bereaved and heartbroken dad (I was only 16 and prone to romanticism) and him devoted to his only daughter.
I was wrong. He was not the man I thought he was. It was weird as I realised for all my mum's instability, for all the cruelty I had from her, she was still the glue in the family. As when she went everything fell apart. Dad had moved another woman in before the earth settled on my mum's grave, she was initially pleasant enough but once she got her feet under the table forced me to move out (my birthday is in October so as soon as I turned 18 I got 'time to move out!') comments, even though I was still at school.
Ultimately I ended up having very little to do with my dad, he's only met DS once (although he is devoted to my stepbrother's children) I don't even feel angry any more. I realise now it's just what men do, what they are like, and that's FINE. I've put safeguarding in place so my share in the house is left to DS not DH as I know if I died DH would remarry and probably stop loving DS and any other children we had.
I guess I've read too many stories like mine to think it's just my dad.
So in short, I don't trust men, but loving someone is accepting who they are and also who they are not. I don't want DS to have to embrace feminine qualities. I just want a daughter too.