about a girl

most of you, by now, would have known that we are expecting a little teensy girl into our family. it's fun to imagine Christian being a 哥哥 (ge ge, chinese for a big brother) and he has taken to calling the sonogram/ultrasound pictures as 妹妹 (mei mei). the little boy has grown so much, and has matured a lot... he's very expressive for a youngster and he could, most of the time, translate words from chinese to english and vice versa (and does that instinctively). when he sees a tragic scene on tv (typically because my mom watches way too many taiwanese soap operas), he cries or get overly emotional. and to tell you the truth, when eric and i were expecting our first kid, we had imagined him to be a boy. so, it did come as a surprise when the doc said we have a high chance of having a girl. for me, personally, i had never thought, until now, that i would be a parent to a girl. and i think it stems from the way i had grown up. girls, particularly girls in a girls' school which i attended, were very complicated.

i went to an all-girls primary school, man, those were tough years socially - toward the later half when we were evolving into teenagers. i could never quite understand why someone would deem me as the enemy out of nowhere, find me "vain" when i didn't even understand what that was supposed to mean until they meant that i always wore "ribbons" or "special hair clips" (hey, my older sister liked to dress me up, okay?) the petty "wars" were never my thing, as were the vicious gossips... so i pretty much stayed out of girly cliques my entire life and always kept to a few close friends only. going to a co-ed high school provided a sense of balance and i continued to be clique-averse until adulthood.

so, can you understand why i worry i might be a bad mom to a little girl? i mean, i don't think i understand girls very well. for boys, i feel slightly more at ease, less complicated.... then, when i think about all the fabulous girls i have as friends, i feel that probably all is not lost. maybe i'm thinking too much, maybe i ought to give girlhood a second chance. maybe, just maybe, cliques are like a facade for loneliness, and i can raise my girl to be confident and intellectual and just not be one of those 'mean girls'....

and then i imagine the strength of bond between the two siblings, how they could slowly learn the bridges of communication with each other, how they have the chance to do both girly things (baking, cooking, shopping, crafting) and boy-sy things (soccer, wrestling, car-racing) together and how much fun I would have with them both, i sort of feel blessed to have a little girl and a little boy in my life. So, save for cinnamon (who's a little girl), our family is quite balanced in a yin-yang way.

p.s. i still owe my mom-in-law halloween pictures. next post, i promise...

{picture from stella mccartney kids}