Simone de Beauvoir believed that although we are born male or female, masculine and feminine traits are socialized behaviors that we are conditioned with. Meaning that technically you could purposefully orchestrate your child to act like a boy or a girl because we all have the predisposition for either. Raising a daughter I sometimes wonder if I am forcing feminine traits on The Munch because of my already existing notion of how I am supposed to behave as a woman, and as a consequence unconsciously passing it on to her. I am tired from all this thinking. I am going to go paint my nails, look at magazines, wonder about fashion, talk about boys, think about shoes, and cry for a little bit.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Part of me sees this point as totally ligament because so much of how we see ourselves in the world is through the nuanced lens of how we were told to behave as children. It is virtually impossible to know what your true nature would have been like beyond the influence of society unless you were raised by a pack of wolves in isolation. And even then you would never know if it was your natural propensity to lick your genitals, or something you just picked up from your wolf parents.

I used to think I wanted The Munch to be Tom Boy because that was what I was, and I wanted us to have interests in common. But now I am wondering what a Tom Boy even is? A girl who likes sports? Maybe I am just athletic? Maybe people just are the way they are, and we as humans assign that behavior to a gender because we are so accustomed to compartmentalizing the world. I for sure notice a difference between The Munch and other boy babies we are around, but she is also different from other girl babies.

I am beginning to think that the best thing I can do is just keep an open mind about what her actual interests are. She loves dolls, but she also is really into cars and trucks. So if I introduce her to different toys and activities maybe I will create a human that is comfortable exploring both her masculine and feminine sides. Just as long as she likes trampolines… because otherwise I am not even sure if she is mine.