TW for this thread, please tread gently.
I really need some support with my thoughts and I thought typing it out here might help.
I am currently pregnant with a little boy - due soon. Baby was much longed for and conceived after multiple losses. I would never ever have considered myself as having any sort of gender preference, but when we found out at a scan that he was a boy, I've been filled with a cold dread ever since that I cannot shake.
We already have a little girl and I would say that I have found parenting her 'easy' in that it's felt instinctive, natural, something I'm comfortable with. I bonded early in her pregnancy and expected that this would be the same with this baby. Instead, I have little to no bond to him - I haven't been able to prepare for him at all, he is unnamed as all names feel like they make him into a man which feels unsafe, and I do not feel excited or positive about his arrival at all.
I was sexually abused as a young child by male adults and to my deepest shame, I re-enacted some of that abuse with my youngest brother. We were very young but we were both traumatised by what happened and it feels to have all come up again since finding out this baby is a boy.
My worries have two threads - first, that I will raise a boy to be a dangerous unsafe man, and second, that he will abuse or hurt his sister.
Whenever the topic of him being a boy comes up, everyone tells me awful things that make me panic - this week alone, three different people have told me that their boy peed in an arc into their mouth, that their toddler smeared his poo, and another that her child 'played' with his erections as a young child. The last had me fleeing the cafe to have a panic attack in my car. I am full of terror about having to provide personal care to this boy, and the thought of skin to skin or breastfeeding him is causing me huge anxiety, so much so I am constantly preoccupied with how I will be able to avoid doing it.
I also feel totally inept at how to protect my daughter and how to keep boundaries that keep her safe (which I know is quite illogical when she is the eldest by some way). I feel like I will make the wrong decision and she will be harmed. Things that worry me are like - should she ever see him have a nappy change? What if she wants to help e.g. wipes his genitals? What are the 'rules' on bathing together? Etc. I am terrified that I will get the boundaries wrong and not supervise them properly and she will then be abused.
I am receiving some support from my mental health team as I have OCD and this has become quite obsessional, but I really hoped someone else out there might be able to share some of their experiences of how they coped if circumstances were similar. I am thinking daily about how I could give him up, or leave the family so that I don't harm them all, and it is so distressing.
Please be gentle - I know gender disappointment on here often gets very negative replies but this isnt about being sad that all the clothes have dinosaurs on... I feel like I fundamentally cannot be this little boy's mother and I am terrified.