This post was originally published in a mothering magazine and is reprinted here with permission.
I jogged along in the newly minted fall morning.
I had Spotify on, tuned to my Power Beats station. Suddenly, “All About That Bass” started.
As my feet adapted to the new, catchy rhythm, I giggled. I also recognized that I didn’t believe a word of what Meghan Trainor bewitchingly sang.
I don’t love my own bass at all. In fact, I was running to get RID of my “bass.”
“Thank goodness I don’t have girls,” I thought. “How could I possibly teach them to have a healthy body image, to be all about their bass, not the treble, when I don’t believe it for myself?”
At this point, I got lost.
Somewhere in that thought, in that song, my mind decided to go for a sprint.
I have two little, wonderful boys. My boys are superheroes in training: they fight hard, get angry hard, love hard, sleep hard, run hard, and play hard. Everything is full throttle. They turn their hands into fists and run into life with abandon.
They were born to a mom who was convinced she was only meant to have girls.
Born to a mom who was upset when she learned from the ultrasound technician that her second (knowingly her last) was also a boy.
My two boys were born to a woman who had saved her nasty, smelly old pointe shoes for nearly 20 years to pass down to her little girls. I still have my first pair of ballet slippers, meant to be worn by my daughter to her first ballet class. I saved my Barbies, especially excited, even after 25 years, to show them the heart dress from Valentine’s Day Barbie. I dreamt of getting lost in Anne of Green Gables and reliving the romantic tale of Gilbert Blythe and Anne Shirley.
I had images of pink frills, lace, and sleepovers with tea parties dancing through my head.
I had dog-eared the Pottery Barn Kids pages for girls’ nurseries until they were torn.
I couldn’t wait to play princesses and fairies.
I was ready to sing all the songs from Sleeping Beauty together.
Of course, life isn’t really like that with girls. There are no guarantees that are given simply because of a birth gender.
Of course.
I know enough about having children now to understand that those were wildly romanticized daydreams.
Yet and still…
The ultrasound technician had looked at my stunned face and cheerfully said, “Well, the good news is that with two boys, you won’t ever have to pay for a wedding!”
“Yes, but now I won’t ever plan a wedding either,” I started to hormonally cry. “And boys leave. Girls stay, boys leave.”
I know. My boys were healthy, and that is all I should have cared about. Please don’t chastise me. Obviously, I cared they were healthy. But the wave of emotion I felt in that ultrasound room is legitimate, too. I believe that women should be allowed to admit that the gender reveal has expectations and feelings. I had an expectation about the sort of mom I would be, what my life would look like, and then I was given two boys.
At some point, I took a wrong turn on my run. While my sprinting mind got lost, I had blindly kept running and was now headed in the wrong direction.
Suddenly, I started to cry. Not over my aching feet the additional quarter mile I just inadvertently added to my jog, or the fact that Spotify didn’t know me at all as it gave me yet another version of the Calabria song.
None of that matters. My eyes welled as I let go of that life I thought I would have, the life at one point I grieved over. I knew beyond a doubt, with everything in my heart, that I was meant to be the mom to my boys.
My skinny, loud, bruised hooligan boys.
My testosterone house, the house I never thought I would have, molded me. I love the mom I am, and I love the role I have grown into. As I turned my running legs to head back towards home, I realized that my ungrateful heart had never taken time to appreciate the simple fact that my boys were boys.
It was my boys who showed me the way.
My boys handed me bugs and worms. My boys aimed their pee on Cheerios in the toilet. They smacked each other on their helmeted heads with whiffle bats, laughing hysterically. And in all of this, they made me the mom I would never have been without them.
One rainy day, they asked me to make them a trampoline on the floor out of couch cushions, and we hurled ourselves off the table onto it. They require a nightly wrestling match of at least 30 minutes. I frequently have to yell, “BAD IDEA! Do NOT climb that!” The other day my toddler boy rode his tiny balance bike straight down the steep mountain biking path in our backyard, a blur of an orange helmet, and when I reached him he was crying face down in a pile of dead leaves, asking to go again.
The children I received were a surprise gift. After everything was all unwrapped, I found myself weeping with gratitude that I was given exactly the children I needed. I thank God I wasn’t given what I thought I wanted.
My boys showed me the truth about who I am.
Last Updated on February 6, 2026 by Mrs. Family Trip