Before my first child was born, I spent long pregnant hours imagining oddly gender-biased scenarios about what it would be like to be a mother. If he was a boy, I decided, we’d take long rambling walks together and look at leaves. He’d spend hours outside with his dad, throwing a ball back and forth. If she was a girl, I’d brush her hair. There would be ribbons. She’d wear sweet dresses, the kind I always wanted in the Sears catalog (but ended up with plain-jane plaid instead). Either way, I would know this child inside and out. We’d be just alike. Flesh of my flesh.

Imagine my surprise when it became clear that Child #1 (not to mention #2, #3, and #4) wasn’t much like me at all. What happened?

I read this essay at Babble about an extroverted mother having difficulty understanding an introverted daughter, and remembered that feeling of surprise all over again. Do we really expect to spawn a bunch of Mini-Me’s? I think we do. I hate to say it, but I sort of did. I’m still surprised (and a bit chagrined) when I see huge traces of my older son’s father in him, for instance, like the way he eats an apple in a hotel room, hunched over the edge of the bed to keep the drips from falling on his shirt, or when anyone else’s face but mine shows up when my daughter smiles a certain way. Who are these kids, anyway? Who let these near-strangers in my house?
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Reading this NY Times piece on last week’s 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment (the one that gave women the right to vote) stopped me in my tracks. Ninety years, really? Is that all? And had it been that long? It seems like another world, doesn’t it? Floor-length skirts, bustles, corsets. Not voting. So much has changed.

But has it?

I’m a child of the 70’s. That was Women’s Lib time. Bra-burning time. I was dimly aware of all that, but not from my mother. She was wearing cat’s-eye glasses and taping little swoops of her dark brown hair to her temples at night with pink tape to create curls the next day. Instead I learned about the feminist movement from reading contraband copies of my older brother’s Mad Magazine. I’m still a little miffed that Mom wasn’t out there marching with signs.

We take our mothers with us to the births of our own children. I’m more like my mother in this than I wish to be. At 7 I wanted to be a hippie, but I still ended up following many of my mother’s size-six footsteps.

I was embarrassed and chagrined to notice, when attending a particular Buddhist meditation sangha for the first time this week, my surprise that the leader was a woman. After all, this is 2010! 40-plus years after bra-burning and Women’s Lib! 90 years after women’s suffrage! Why am I still entrenched in Mad Men-style gender roles?
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