OK. Deep, dark parental admission time: I never really wanted to have a boy. And I’m not sure why not.
It’s not that I was hoping we wouldn’t have a boy. I was indifferent as to the matter of sex when our baby was growing in Leah’s womb; I just wanted the baby to be born with enough physical and mental capacity to have a good start in the world, regardless of what was going on with its genitals. And we got that, thankfully. I was dumbstruck when the nurse told us we had a little girl. I’d always known I didn’t want to know our child’s sex ahead of its birth, but I didn’t understand what a wise intuition that was until that moment of delivery. A girl. Those two words were forever transformed at about 9:45 p.m. on September 17th, 2004.
I’ve wondered occasionally since then how things might’ve been different had I had time to get used to the idea of a girl. Much of the thrill of the delivery — aside from seeing Leah totally whacked out of her mind on heavy drugs — was the big bomb of seeing my child and learning its sex at the same time. Half of that thrill would’ve been gone had we found out Ava’s sex via ultrasound.
Jump forward three years. I’m watching Intervention recently with Leah, and there’s a story about a young girl with a heroin addiction. We’ve seen episodes like it before, and of course we fall into the same emotional trap every time we tune in: Parents are at a loss as to how to reach these kids (many of the parents lost that ability — if they ever had it — long before the kids got into drugs), and the kids themselves are too far gone to realize just how they got hooked in the first place. It doesn’t matter now, in any case, because life is only the the jagged ride between highs and trying to score.
More than other episodes, though, this one chilled me. The father, like so many are, was caught between enabling this daughter by giving her money for drugs and cutting her off, forcing her into the arms of her sleazy junkie boyfriend. I wasn’t sure where to look when the daughter and father were on screen together. Could that ever be Ava? Could I ever become that father, helpless, sobbing, caught in a pit of worry and regret as he sees every parenting mistake he ever made wrapped up in this frail little girl sitting across the room from him?
This morning, I stood at the window and watched the parking spaces along our street fill up with the jalopies driven by the students returning to high school for the fall. One car emptied three girls onto the curb, one of whom was clearly pregnant. I tried to project Ava into her shoes. My mind raced like the W.O.P.R. in War Games, testing and discarding each scenario I could imagine that would end up with Ava showing up for high school with a bun in the oven. What kinds of failures would we have to perpetrate as parents to arrive at such a point?
The girl and her friends walked up the sidewalk and out of my sight just as Ava came downstairs in her t-shirt and underpants, hair still tousled from sleep. “I have an idea!” she pronounced. I knew what was coming. “Why don’t I sit on the couch and watch Planet Earth DVDs while I eat my breakfast?” I acquiesced. Moments later, Ava sat, mesmerized, in front of the TV as father Emperor Penguins huddled together in the months-long Antarctic darkness in huge groups to stay warm as 100-mph winds blew and the temperature dropped to -40F. Each penguin shielded a single egg, protected under a special pouch of skin and resting on the father’s feet. The male penguins don’t eat for four months, saving the last of their food reserves to give their chick its first meal upon hatching. That’s not love. Only survival. Just genetics. I keep telling myself….