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In my basement , beneath the boxes of Christmas ornaments and Easter baskets, is a doll cradle. It's white with intricate gold spindles and tiny black wheels that look like miniature tea cookies. My great-grandfather made the bed for my mother, who passed it down to me. I always thought I'd hand down the doll bed to my daughter, who would play with it as lovingly as I had. Instead I had two boys.
I vividly recall the day my first son was born. When the doctor handed Nicholas to me, I looked into his eyes, dark and shiny as onyx, and experienced a love so deep it existed before me and will somehow keep on going even after I'm gone. I was a changed woman; I'd become a mother.
A few weeks later, while I was in the grocery store, a stranger spotted me carrying my tiny blue-clad baby and said, "I had a boy first and then I had a daughter. I love my boy, but a daughter does something special to a mother's heart."
Since then I've sometimes wondered: Would my life be more complete if I also had a daughter? I imagine we'd attend our parish's annual mother/daughter tea, wearing frilly dresses we picked out on a shopping trip together. I'd teach her how to braid her hair, bake a pie, apply lipstick with a flourish. She'd teach me about the latest fashions during her teen years, when we'd swap shoes and handbags. The two of us would roll our eyes when the guys in our family pounded their fists against their chests and roared like Tarzan after Brett Favre threw a 60-yard touchdown pass. The guys in our family would roll their eyes at us when we cried uncontrollably during the tender scenes of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
"Girls," they'd say. "We'll never understand them." But my phantom daughter and I wouldn't care. We'd understand each other, something I can't always say about my sons. Why, for instance, do Ben and Nicholas, ages six and eight, wrestle first thing in the morning and right before bedtime? Why do they get a rise out of belching at the dinner table? Why do they constantly need to poke at each other? I just don't get it.
I've never forgotten the words my pediatrician spoke when I took Nicholas in for his 12-month check-up and he kept slamming himself onto the ground, laughing. I worried this strange behavior meant there was something abnormal about my son, but the doctor reassured me by saying, "Anyone who says there are no differences between boys and girls has never worked with kids."
He's right, of course, although I didn't know that at first. When Ben was three, I set my heirloom doll bed in the playroom one day to see what he would do, hoping we could play dolls together. It would make him a good father someday, I reasoned. When Ben toddled right past the Tonka trucks and picked up a doll in his arms, I thought, My pediatrician is wrong. There really aren't any differences between girls and boys, at least at this young age. But then Ben threw the doll on the floor and said, "I'm going to chop off your head."
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