meg,
I just saw this article that may be of interest to you about Gender Disappointment. it was from a site called childmags. there are other sites addressing the issue.
I hope this article may help you and realise you are not alone and there things you can do.
Quirky
Is this common?
If you are distressed about your baby’s gender it is important to understand disappointment is not an unusual response. It doesn’t mean you will be unable to love your child.
Gender disappointment is essentially the result of a gap between what you hoped for and what you got. Parents-to-be will need to grieve the loss of the child they hoped for and reimagine the life they thought they would have, but with a child of the opposite gender.
Some ways that can help include:
• Acknowledging the grief is real and that it is okay to be disappointed.
• Understanding that your feelings are not about the baby you are carrying, but about the loss of an imagined experience.
• Setting a time limit to feel sad about the gender of the baby, then committing yourself to focusing on the baby you are carrying.
• Considering how you constructed this picture of what life would be like to parent a child of a certain gender. What influenced these thoughts? How realistic were these thoughts?
Many parents assume what their baby will be like, or what their relationship with their baby will be, based on past experiences. But our experiences are heavily biased and do not account for the possibility that this baby, or this parent-child relationship will turn out very differently. Understand that there is no guarantee this baby would have been as you had hoped, even if it had been the ‘right’ gender.
