Boys or girls?



Up until the hour of my birth, I was a boy.

We don’t know much about a baby before it is born, and in 1955 we knew even less.  What will it look like?  What kind of personality will it have?  How smart will it be?  We could guess at eye color and hair color, but even that was often a surprise.  Then and now, though, the first question asked and answered tends to be the gender.  Now, we have gender reveal early in a pregnancy and the decorating in pink or blue can begin.

Baby “James Patrick” was eagerly anticipated by friends, relatives, and strangers since 2 girls and 2 boys would be a fine balance. The family consisted of the oldest, Kathie, who was almost 14, and the kids, Marilyn and Mike who were 9 and 8.  Mike had two older sisters and had been feeling outnumbered for years, and looked forward to evening the score.   My brother tells me he has a clear memory of my dad getting home from the hospital very early in the morning and waking the kids up.  “It’s a girl!” he said.  Mike cried bitterly, seeing his only chance for a brother evaporating. 

James Patrick was the ghost that followed me around and told me what might have been.  I dreamed of him once.  He was a stocky, sandy-haired boy with a crew cut, unlike my lanky brother Mike.  In his dream incarnation, he had been born before me and had died in a car accident as a
small child. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Diego in the 1960s

Image
  (San Diego Zoo late 1950s.  That is my uncle and cousin from Montana on the left, my sister Kathie next to them, and me in front.) We lived in San Diego, home of a famous zoo, beaches, and two bays (Mission Bay, which was recreational, and San Diego Bay, full of Navy ships).   My parents did not go in for recreational activities, so I rarely went any of those places unless we had relatives visiting out of town.   We did go to the Zoo a time or two with relatives from Montana, and took them to the beach as well.   I didn’t start going to any of the famous San Diego places until later in the 60s when my friends’ older siblings could drive and would take us. Bonita Cove was a small inlet on Mission Bay.   It was quiet and felt a bit like our own discovery.   No hotels or restaurants were nearby.   It was directly across a busy street called Mission Boulevard from the ocean.   Our parents were okay with us spending all day at the bay, as it w...
Read more

Blix Street kids

Image
  When I was 8 years old, Bambie (next door) was 10 and Candy (across the street) was 6.   The two of them had very little in common, with different interests and a 4-year age span.   I was in the enviable position of being in the middle of an unstable threesome.   We rarely were all friends at one time.   Candy was a kind of a play-inside, dolls-and-hairdos kind of girl.   Bambie was an outdoorsy tomboy.   It was the best of both worlds for me.   (Interesting how both my friends at that time had future stripper names.   Candy was short for Candace, which no one but her mother called her.   Bambie was a nickname given her by her brother, when he was reading the Disney story of that name). Bambie was a little bigger than me, and a little stronger.   She could hold me down and spit in my face, or make me eat grass; luckily, those incidents were rare.   We were both skinny and gangly, often had skinned knees, and endured the “pi...
Read more