Admit it! All mums prefer their sons to their daughters
. . . or so insists a very provocative SHONA SIBARY
The moment had finally arrived. Twenty weeks pregnant and beached up on the antenatal couch ready for my scan, I could barely contain my impatience.
The sonographer had mistaken me for the kind of woman who wanted a lengthy preamble on her growing baby’s development, and she waffled on and on about fingers and toes and the size of head when — actually — what I wanted to hear was one thing and one thing only.
It was all I could do not to yell: ‘Open your legs and let me see what’s there.’ To the foetus, obviously, not the scanner.
And then, as if by magic, it happened. The baby shifted to reveal all and the sonographer turned to me and said: ‘Well there’s very definitely something dangling and — let’s put it this way — it’s not the umbilical cord.’
Lo and behold angels may as well have descended from the sky singing arias, such was the joy I felt.
After two girls and four years of treading on tiny plastic Polly Pocket parts on the living room floor; after a tsunami of pinkness and tangled hair and fussy eating, I was finally having a boy! Call it hormones but I instantly burst into tears of relief.
Twelve years on, I feel pretty much the same. Since Monty’s birth another daughter has joined our brood — Dolly, now five — raising the oestrogen cohort to three. Monty remains my one and only son.
Perhaps this goes some way in explaining why he can walk into the kitchen in the morning, dishevelled, monosyllabic and mildly pongy, and I will stand, breathless in awe, at the sheer wonder of him. The girls? They barely get a second glance.
It therefore came as no surprise to me when, last week, newsreader Kate Silverton admitted that protectiveness towards her ninemonth-old son, Wilbur, often came at the expense of f i rst born, daughter, Clemency’s, feelings.
SPeAKIng candidly to the Mail, Kate admitted that contrary to people telling her, ‘ Oh I raised my children exactly the same,’ the truth is ‘it can never be the same.’
She added: ‘I couldn’t be prepared for the amount of love I felt for my little boy, having been so overwhelmingly in love with my daughter.’
Kate, 44, may have a degree in child psychology, but surely she doesn’t need one to see why this is? There is something instinctively effortless about loving a son.
even the way Monty entered the world felt easier than giving birth to his sisters. The girls came out furious, each one of them indignant and railing at me with their cross little fists and wailing protests that reverberated around the labour ward.
Monty simply opened his cloudy blue eyes and fixed them on my face, a look that invoked an immediate and all- consuming rush of love which has only intensified over time. From that moment he has worn his vulnerability on his sleeve. I’ll never forget his first night in hospital.
I’d had a water birth and his body temperature was slightly low, so they put a little woolly hat on his head and placed him under a warming lamp next to my bed.
Of course, I felt rushes of maternal love for the girls when they were born, but nothing like this.
I remember gazing at my new born son through the Perspex side of his cot and, in a fog of hormonal emotion, thinking: ‘I will kill the girl who breaks your heart.” And before you all accuse me of blatant favouritism there is strong historical and literary evidence backing up the closeness of a mother’s relationship with her son.
not to mention that a survey of 2,500 mothers by netmums revealed half had a stronger bond with their sons, and a whopping 88 per cent admitted treating their daughters differently.
The findings showed mothers praised particular characteristics in their sons, seeing them as funny, cheeky and playful, while denigrating similar attributes in their daughters by referring to them as argumentative or stroppy. All four of my children have strong personalities and r egularly demonstrate behaviour that isn’t necessarily a reflection on their gender. They can each argue until the cows come home, push boundaries and drive me to distraction.
Am I harder on the girls as a result? You bet I am. It’s because when Flo, 16, fixes me with a look of disdain and Annie, 14, rolls her eyes, it’s as if I’m looking in a mirror — and I don’t always like what I see.
With Monty it’s different. My relationship with him feels lighter, unencumbered by the angst I often experience when I see my own foibles reflected in my daughters. I may be more critical of the girls, more aware of their setbacks and the challenges that face them, but they also have an uncanny knack of making me feel on occasion like the worst mother in the world.
I once heard Lesley garrett, the opera singer, say about parenting: ‘every day my daughter breaks my heart, but every day my son is there to mend it.’
Could a statement ring more true? Just the other day I experienced a triple whammy from the girls. Dolly kicked it off by refusing to eat her breakfast toast because I had sliced it into triangles and not the quarters she prefers.
next up, Annie arrived in the kitchen with her face caked in orange foundation and, on being asked to scrape some of it off, told me, with tears in her eyes, that I was ‘damaging her self-esteem’.
Then, j ust when I needed another round with another daughter like a hole in the head, Flo put the boot in with the helpful observation that my stress levels were the one thing in the mornings that caused everybody in the household untold misery.
AnD where was Monty in all of this? Well, he emptied the dishwasher, made me a cup of coffee and then, just when I thought I might cry, told me that my outfit of choice for the day (dog-walking jeans and an old baggy jumper) made me look ‘slim’ and ‘cool’.
Of course, I love all my children in different ways. It’s just that with the girls I often have the uneasy sense that I’m trying to assemble flatpack furniture with an instruction manual that’s in Korean. nothing I say or do is right.
They can be infuriatingly oversensitive. They challenge me, push me away and l eave me certain that I’m falling short in my maternal duties every day. Monty is another creature altogether. he tells me I am wonderful all the time, even when I yell like a harridan or forget to wash his Pe kit.
When he’s with me he somehow manages to convince me I’m getting this parenting lark right. Ours is a mutual patting-on-the-back relationship. Flo, Annie and Dolly prefer to keep me on my toes.
I remember a friend once told me that when she looked at her daughter she could see all her own flaws, but in her son she could only see the traits of the man with whom she had fallen in love.
Certainly, it’s a truth most mothers would struggle to admit. Or perhaps it has more to do with the old adage: ‘A son is a son until he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life.’
Deep down, I know the clock is ticking on the time I have left to be at the centre of Monty’s world. Before too long there will be another woman waiting in the wings ready to steal his heart.
Maybe then, and only then, can my relationship with my daughters truly come into its own. If, that is, we’re still on speaking terms.