Therapy for severe gender disappointment

[HL321]

Hi everyone,

please no judgement here as I appreciate im in a really fortunate position compared to many people, I acknowledge that I think I’m having a mental health challenge. I just found out we’re having our second boy, and I will preface that I adore our son, but I am absolutely devastated not to be having a girl.

i feel like it’s gone beyond gender ‘disappointment’ - I feel very disconnected from my pregnancy and I went from being so excited to absolute dread in the instant I found out :( I keep trying to convince myself that the NIPT was wrong but I know at 99.9a% accuracy that’s not true! I had my 12 week scan recently and I felt nothing…in my head I said I wouldn’t be disappointed if there was something wrong with the baby and we had to terminate which is just not me at all (and if it came down to it I know this wouldn’t be true) but I am regretting getting pregnant despite it being very much planned and wanted. everywhere I go I am comparing myself to other families with girls and feeling even worse.

i think my fear is less so about having a boy but more so about never having a girl. I worry about our future with sons and not having the same mother/daughter close relationship with them, not getting to help plan a daughters wedding, being the ‘mother in law’, not having someone to care for us when we’re old as this is typically a female role. All ridiculous I know but I’m so in my own head.

I had the same with my son, not to this extent, but I was really gutted, however I always knew we would have a second and could have a girl then. It continued even beyond birth to feeling really jealous and resentful of friends having girls, so I’m thinking I probably need to address this now before the baby is born.

has anyone had therapy relating to gender disappointment who found it helpful? Im feeling very low and lost but hoping with some professional support I can work through it. Thanks so much x

Like a pp I also wanted DS1 to have a brother more than I wanted a girl. And now 23 years on I can see that two boys for us, has been absolutely the best outcome.

The ‘truth’ is purely socialisation, because of people like the OP, who do not expect to be close to their sons in adulthood and do not expect them to look after them when they’re old. It’s hardly surprising that, if raised to think that way, and if their sisters are socialised to be dutiful, expect to emotionally fulfil their mothers, have them help plan their wedding and bond over grandchildren, there’s a different. But if you want your sons to be emotionally literate and to regard closeness to their parents (psychological, if not geographical) as normal in adulthood, then raise them that way, and not in a way that makes it clear you have entirely different expectations of their sisters.

Possibly because you raised your son(s) with this expectation. My brother in law sees his mum a couple of times a week as they live nearby and DH sees her regularly. They weren't brought up with the message that they could drop their birth family when they married.

My Aunt has two daughters and a son, her daughters both live on a different continent to her so looking after duties are very much her son's department.

I hope my wonderful, loved and cherished son never reads the numerous threads on here that claim all women really want daughters and that sons are some sort of consolation prize. Not for me. The dog and the cats are male too because I chose them.

It is so very hard and I can really empathise. I really wanted a girl with my second and also experienced that crushing disappointment when i found out at 16 weeks. I lost all interest in my pregnancy and became fixated on the gender of my baby and convinced myself that my baby was an imposter and I needed to have him adopted. I remember speaking to the midwife and telling her that she needed to take him when he was born.

Unsurprisingly I was very mentally unwell, I was when pregnant with my first son also but without the fixation on gender.

It lifted once I had him. I get pangs every now and again when I see little girls with their mothers and feel envious. Especially as my son is probably one of the worst behaved children that i have ever come across. However that being said, i absolutely adore him. I had a terrible pregnancy but a good birth and that really helped as a good starting point for that attachment. I had a planned c section which helped me to prepare.

I have a terrible relationship with my own mother and my mother in law sees my children far more often, shes been on holiday with us and spent Christmas with us. My mother never has. Yes i do some of the planning of those events and yes I have to remind my husband to contact his mum but its all a balance.

You need to be kind to yourself and get some help for your mental health in pregnancy. Your feelings are valid but they are likely a symptom of something underlying in terms of your mental health. Focus on what you can control in your pregnancy and the choices you can make to the best of your ability, eg. Your birth plan, your birthing partner etc.

You are not alone in feeling like this and I promise you it does get better x

Oh my gosh thats such a helpful comment when trying to look on the bright side for the OP, nice one ✋️

Yep, my point is literally that many mundane, everyday factors related to raising daughters are inherently more enjoyable for women. So by logic, it's not unreasonable to be disappointed at being deprived of that experience. It has absolutely nothing to do with how much you love your children or how wanted a child is. It's simply stating a fact that most women will probably find female-centred activities more fun and having a daughter means you get to engage in those things more often.

Another way to see it is if you have a partner obsessed with a sport that you don't care about at all (football, cycling, tennis, whatnot). If he insists on going on a holiday themed around that, you can go along to make him happy but you probably won't enjoy that experience on a personal level. You would enjoy a city break or beach resort a lot more if you could pick it freely. Parenting boys means making a lot of personal sacrifice in a similar level. You will need to support their hobbies and interests that don't necessarily overlap with your own.

And of course, this is the time when the pearl-clutchingly prude MN brigade suddenly become all liberal and start defending stereotyped gender roles, trans or non-binary identities. Of course there is always the chance your son might not like sports or a girl might not like crafts but you don't go through life assuming you have to deal with the outlier situation. Statistically, having a girl means you will have a different experience of parenting compared to a boy and it's really odd how some people are hellbent on denying there is any difference. Similarly, all girl families are different to all boy families or mixed sex families or twins or big age differences. It's just silly to pretend otherwise.

And excessively positive comments with no basis for reality are helpful? Come on.

I was really looking forward to sharing my love of sport (football, tennis, cricket, athletics, rugby) with a child of either sex. My son didn't get the memo. No interest in sport at all but that OK we bond over music and films instead. I have no interest in pink sparkly thinks. I'd like to think that if I'd had a girl she would be an ungirly girl like I was but I'm sure I would have found joy in even the most girlie girl.

Not all girls want to drown in a sea of pink. I sure as hell didn't.

Yes there are differences but I found the examples of ‘baking’ and ‘crafts’ a bit strange as they are very non-gender specific and a big part of parenting for both mums of girls and boys in my experience. I would just never associate either of those things as more boyish or girly and surprised that anybody would.

My younger boy is obsessed with swimming which I hate, the other likes a lot of theatre and musicals which I don’t really share the love for either, but I go along anyway- I think that’s just a lot of parenting in general, you’re lucky if you get some sort of miniature version of yourself that likes all the exact same things. My best friends DD is massively into anime type stuff and emo bands- neither which my friend has a shred of interest in.

I baked and crafted with my DS when he was little. It was no odds to me if a was baking pink cakes with unicorn horns or green cakes with googly eye. Drawing, colouring, sticker books, model making and loads of other crafts again who cares if it's fairy or dinosaur themed it's broadly the same activity.

We have the only girl in the family and at 13 she declared she is trans. My boys are much more cuddly and will be more likely to reach out more to us (not fill a caring role) when we are old. My DH is closer to his parents than his sister. My brother is far FAR closer to my DM than me.
What I am trying to say to you is your dream of a girl sounds more like you were dreaming of a dated stereotype, not a reality that you are missing out on.

I think it should be acknowledged that there is such a gender preference for boys globally that 100 million women were never born. Men have wanted sons since time immemorial. Why would women not want daughters?

Exactly. I think if you've that hung up on a particular sex, don't get pregnant! I would never want a female child so I made sure to never get pregnant. I'm not crazy about the idea of a son either, but if I got pregnant accidentaly and the child was a boy I would not terminate, vs I would terminate a girl.

A lot of women want sons as well. It's only here, misandry central, where people are so hung up on having girls.

It’s not just a Mn thing in my experience. Both my SILs condoled with me when I knew I was having a boy ( whom I knew would be my only child) — they assumed every woman wanted to be a ‘girl mum’ and thought I was just ‘being brave’ when I said I had no particular sex preference. One had two boys and one had three before they ‘got their girl’.

Good lord, that's insane. I mean, I would prefer to have a boy than a girl, but I wouldn't 'condole' with a woman who was expecting a girl. That's just incredibly rude and bizarre.

It's always a boy!

I came onto this thread thinking that if you were horrified to be having a girl I would pay for your therapy myself.

Poor lad.

I have a daughter and a son. We have great times together. Fortunately, we never pushed either of them into conventional gender roles. OP has a right to her disappointment. But I hope the new baby will not suffer for it. And I hope she never says anything about this out loud where her older son can hear it. Her sons will probably as close to her as she allows. I hope OP ends up accepting and celebrating who her children are Therapy sounds essential.

You should address in therapy why you believe all the things you envision as the mother of a daughter and why you think any of that would be good for either one of you.

Frankly, your imagined future as the mother of a daughter sounds very enmeshed and very unhealthy.

Let's all race to the bottom then...

I can't believe you just posted that on a chat forum. I'm pretty sure sex selective abortion is not legal in the UK. At any rate, it is a horrible.

Agreed. I think your expectations of any child are very bizarre and skewed and I feel rather glad you are not having a girl to load all that expectation onto.

It will be a very good idea to address in therapy where you got all those 1950s expectations of a female child. What is your relationship with your own mother? Do you have brothers who were treated differently to you?

Yes, and the thing is, they’re both very nice, otherwise sane, and well-disposed towards me. They genuinely believed I must be privately devastated and that they were supporting me! Whereas I had not yet arrived on Mn, had no idea that so many women cherished intense sexual preferences and it hadn’t occurred to me to have any of my own.

Yes, the two SILs I’ve mentioned on this thread, who both had multiple boys before ‘getting their girl’, including, in one case, getting pregnant again when she’d been advised it was dangerous after a very difficult previous birth — honestly, the much-longed-for ‘mother of girls’ thing didn’t really work out for either party. They both put far too much pressure on their daughters, both of whom ‘failed’ to fulfil the fantasy, probably because it was shoved on them so intensely, by blinkered, though well/meaning mothers. Both daughters are unmarried and childfree, by choice. Both in different ways in adulthood rejected their mothers’ focus on their looks. One is rather overdependent on her mother and still lives at home in her 30s, the other is quite distant.