Pink When You Wanted Blue

"One last push, Sharon! Bear down! That’s it... great... here we go... Congratulations, it’s a boy!" As her husband high-fived the nurse and wept with joy, Sharon’s eyes too filled with tears. Tears of exhaustion. Tears of exertion. Tears of disappointment? Yes, disappointment. Sharon had wanted a girl.

Ask any expectant parent the question, "Do you want a boy or a girl?", and without exception you are going to get the answer, "Oh I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s healthy." And while that answer is true - we all desperately want our baby to be healthy -- it usually also hides a specific gender preference. A preference for boy or girl, that we are afraid to voice, lest we jinx the outcome.

In a survey of 10,648 responding parents worldwide, 79 percent admitted to having a decided gender preference going into and throughout their pregnancies. Surprisingly, in many cases the preference was to please the spouse. One female respondent wrote, "I wanted a boy to give my husband, who was very macho and into sports, what he wanted... another him!" Male respondents, overwhelmingly, had a preference for a son. Even my own husband, now the father of three daughters, admits that during our first pregnancy, he wanted a boy. But only because that is what he thought he was supposed to want.

This is not uncommon, according to obstetrician/gynecologist, Dr. Marilyn Hendricks. "In my practice, I hear expectant fathers every day who are absolutely fixated on being recreated in miniature. The emotional pressure they place on the mother is considerable. And I am always amused when I educate them to the fact that he, not she, is responsible for the sex of the child. To use a football analogy, the woman is merely there to catch the pass, the man is the quarterback throwing the X or Y."

In Sharon’s case though, she had wanted to catch an X. She had wanted a baby girl since she was a baby girl. As a child she loved to play Mommy with her dolls, dress them in pretty dresses, change their homemade washcloth diapers, feed them pretend bottles and sing them lullabies. But they were always girls. Even as a teen, she would wistfully wander among the pink section of the baby clothes department, envisioning the perfect pink baby girl she would have someday.

So how can you come to terms with a disappointment, decades in the making? A disappointment that brings with it intense guilt and even a measure of shame? I mean how can you not feel ashamed about being unhappy during one of the greatest moments of your life?