[“When I learned that my second baby would be designated “boy,” I googled the term “gender disappointment,” but my search didn’t turn up anything that tracked with how I was feeling. My love already felt endangered by the breadth of its demand: now there would be two kids to care for, and now I understood the comprehensive nature of that work. And in any case, hadn’t I always been disappointed by gender? Once he was born, I even felt for a time less pressure. He would be endowed with many layers of privilege; the kind I had as a white person and also the kind his father had, as a man. Jon and I joked uneasily that our jobs would be easier this time around. This baby would be fine. He would grow up to be a white man in a white man’s world.
In other words, at first I saw my second baby not as a victim of power, but more as an inevitable foe. As if here, in front of me, was someone who would benefit from all the power structures I hated, from everything that had troubled me and the women in my life. At the very least, I saw my new baby as someone who did not need my emotional protection in the same way my daughter would, and my rage took a different form with him in the first two years of his life, as it always had with rowdy little boys who seemed to take up all the space. As he brought his baby wrath to bear on my body every night at the witching hour, mouthing my breasts and tearing into me with his impossible-to-trim nails, I projected masculine violence onto his healthy infantile aggression. When he began to walk, I was harder on him when he bumped into other kids carelessly, just as I had always been with the boys at the daycare. I knew his right to take up space would always be greater than my daughter’s, and when he acted out in frustration, threw his body into it, I scolded him harder, trying to block off some path on which I felt he was already walking a little too firmly.
Parenting a son with patriarchy in mind meant I had to be extra attentive to the ways in which my best efforts at making him a good person would be thwarted by a culture of masculinity that would teach him to take take take. But by the time he turned two, I felt like I had been conned into reproducing the exact gender roles I was trying to avoid. I had positioned my daughter as a victim of the patriarchy, my son as an aggressor. I had left no room for anything in between. I had, despite my best efforts, developed a pattern of reinforcing the gender binary, even if the way I was doing it wasn’t quite in line with how I saw others projecting gender on to my children.
Trying to keep up with his big busy sister, Elliott became quite the bruiser. Whatever I did, however I hovered, I could not keep him from injuring himself. Those around us often linked his gaucheness with his perceived gender identity, which frustrated me, because I saw in him the confusion I felt as the younger sibling, carrying around a body so full of energy, without any clear understanding of where to direct that vitality, or how to get anyone in the family to pay attention to me. But Elliott also grew to be so tender, thoughtful in a way I never expected. Like all children, he became a multifaceted little creature.”]
amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023
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