I’m neuro-atypical (ADHD), so I apologize in advance for any lack of social graces in this comment.
I’m sure I would have loved boys if I’d had them, but I was happy and relieved to have two girls. I’m a SAHM and was planning to be since before I got pregnant, and if I was going to be the parent who spent more time with the kids, I wanted kids who were more likely to share my interests. Yeah, girls might not care about dolls, or making jewelry, or reading books with all my favorite literary heroines. And boys might. But let’s be honest about the odds - I was probably not going to have a little boy who was excited about the things I hoped to share with my child.
Mothers get blamed for everything that might possibly go wrong with how their son views women. Everything from “son is a serial rapist” to “son never unloads the dishwasher” - it’s always blamed on his mother and how she raised him. I don’t know any adult men who grew up to be close with their moms. There are lots of fictional examples of close relationships between mothers and their adult daughters, but what’s probably the most famous fictional story about an adult son and his close relationship with his mother? “Psycho.”
Culturally speaking, girls can do anything, but boys still get stuffed in tight gender boxes. A lot of the clothes made for little boys are just plain ugly. On average, boys are more badly behaved in the classroom, less verbal, and take longer to be toilet-trained. Boys are more likely to want to play organized sports, and organized sports bore me to tears. And also? Although I’m aware that it’s supposedly a normal developmental stage, it really unnerves me how little boys go around touching their genitals in front of other people. It feels violating how people just tolerate it and laugh about it.
I’m an only child - so, no brothers - and I was single-sex educated from age twelve onwards. Except for one kid when we were really little, I wasn’t friends with any of the boys in my class when I was younger. I don’t understand little boys. On one hand, people will say they’re not that different from little girls - then, on the other hand, when they do something I never did as a child, it’s “oh, that’s just how boys are.”
One of the little boys in my daughter’s kindergarten class is an adorable, sensitive, sweet kid. I’m sure I would have loved being a mother to a little boy like that. But then I look at all the little boys who are destructive and rude, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.