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By Anna Rahmanan
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I have a friend who is dramatic about most things, but nothing seems to incite quite as much anxiety in her as discussing the difficulty of raising her children, who happen to be around the same age as my own.
The interesting thing is that her children are perfectly lovely, well-behaved kids. Her distress has less to do with who they are than with their gender. Because her firstborn was a boy (a remarkably quiet, calm, well-behaved boy, I should add), she has always maintained that she had it harder than I did, having had a girl first.
She arrived at this conclusion before she'd ever had a daughter herself, which always struck me as odd. How, exactly, do you know boys are harder to raise than girls when you've never raised a girl?
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My friend means no harm. Exaggeration (and exasperation) are simply her modus operandi. But she belongs to a category of parents I find increasingly irritating—those who have decided that their children's gender determines the difficulty of their parenting experience, and who feel entitled to inform everyone else where they fall in the hierarchy of suffering.
And this goes both ways. I know mothers of girls who insist that their daughters' emotional vulnerability and sensitivity are infinitely harder to deal with than boys' seemingly endless physical energy. I also know mothers who argue the exact opposite—that boys' constant need for activity and food is far more exhausting than anything a girl could put you through.
Guess what? Both groups are right. About their own children, that is. The trouble begins when they mistake personal experience for universal truth.
I have two daughters and two sons, which I suppose gives me a certain standing in this debate, although I would prefer the debate didn't exist.
Some of my children are more difficult than others. Some have been easier at certain ages and nearly impossible at others. Their temperaments, sensitivities, stubbornness and particular talents for testing my patience have never arranged themselves into especially useful gender categories. Nor have their needs remained consistent long enough for me to develop a reliable theory.
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And even my easiest child (don't ask me who it is, it depends on the day of the week) has been hard to raise.
This is the part that gets lost in the competitive accounting of parenthood—raising a child is hard even when said child is cooperative, healthy and (this is rare) pleasant. Considering we're trying to help form full-fledged adults that can properly function in society and eventually navigate it without constantly nagging us, the difficulty of the task at hand should not be a surprise. The stakes are high, folks!
Which makes the insistence on ranking our respective hardships especially strange. What, exactly, is the prize? Acknowledgment that your particular domestic arrangement is the most taxing? Permission to complain more loudly because you had a boy when I had a girl or vice versa?
Perhaps what irritates me most is the ease with which we turn our children's personalities into proof of our own exceptional hardship. A difficult son is evidence that boys are impossible; a difficult daughter, that girls are worse. Somehow, the child becomes a supporting character in the parent's account of suffering.
I'd rather we grant our children the dignity of being difficult, delightful and occasionally insufferable individuals, without making them answer for an entire gender. After all, our children have enough trouble figuring out who they are without being made to prove how hard we have it.
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