The Son

Biology told me I had a daughter. Twenty-some years of being a father told me otherwise.

- MARK HEALY

As new fathers go, I was pretty smug. Our first child was a girl. Because my wife has exceptional taste and didn’t want to subject the world to another Izzy or Sophia or Madison, we named her Evan, a traditionally male name—our way of encroaching on masculine territory without having to actually participate in it.

Only now do I recognize the arrogance in that. A beautiful girl with a boy’s name is the stuff of local legend. A homely girl with a boy’s name is just cruel. Someone joked—a male someone, of course—that with a name like that, you’d better hope she doesn’t grow up to be butch. Its only effect at the time was to make me think less of whoever said it.

When it came time to have a second kid, our preference was absolute: We were so smitten with Evan, we knew we wanted more of the same. Another round of daughter, please, just like the first.

I remember the sonogram well. I’d been a father for two-plus years then and was filled with all the misplaced confidence that comes with thinking you know what you’re doing. “Do you want to know the sex?” they asked. “Sure,” we said, practically shrugging.

A girl. Another girl. We would name this one Claude. I breathed a sigh of relief. Disaster averted.

At the time I couldn’t have described the disaster I felt I’d just avoided, but I remember comfort knowing there would not be another male in the family. It wasn’t that I enjoyed some special status there or that I feared some Oedipal threat—a competition for affection, or resources, or status. It was simply that I had some understanding of what raising a boy could require. I’d been on the playground. I’d sat at the preschool snack table. I’d seen for myself by then. There were many exceptions, of course, but in my narrow mind, young boys were basically defective, a subspecies of coarse, aggressive cretin to whom my poised, chatty, physically coordinated three-year-old daughter seemed only tangentially related. Like I said, I was smug.