Not a scarred-for-life thing, not by any means the worst thing that happened in my childhood, but…
My niece Alexis, my sister’s first child, is eleven months younger than I, and lived with us for a while after Sis split from the husband/father. Everyone in my family is short. Not dwarfs or whatever you call them, but short. My dad is 5’8", for instance, and I topped out at 5’1", which makes me taller than mom. However, Alexis’ dad is 6’ or so, and Alexis outpaced me in height as soon as we were both walking.
Now, I understand that the height was a novelty, and it was difficult for people to resist commenting on it. But I could have done without:
—hearing people say, “Stand them back to back,” as if we were pets or furniture. They could have said, “Rilchie and Alexis, stand back to back.”
—the implication that Alexis was achieving something simply by following her genetic code,
and
—the perpetuation of the attitude that being short is a deficiency, something to be embarrassed about. I felt (gimme a break, I was like 4) as if they were proud of her and ashamed of me.
I can also imagine that there would be problems if the last child did turn out to be a different gender. I can easily see four older sisters bossing around the boy, or four older brothers mercilessly teasing the girl. This might or might not be accompanied by “You let hir get away with everything/give hir everything s/he wants! You love him more because he’s a BOY/her more because she’s a GIRL!” And then there would be what Dangerosa mentioned: not being able to hand stuff down.
I dunno. I think it’s what L.M. Boyd said once: “There’s only one solution. Be born grownup.”
One of my friends was telling us about this family that she saw in her practice (she’s a doctor), and it consisted of nine girls and one boy, with the oldest be9ing something like seventeen, and the youngest but a baby. The parents were definitely trying for a boy, as they were a traditional Cietnamese family. (Tradiational Asian families think boys are to be more preferred than girls, because they’ll carry on the family name and things like that)
But as to the people described in the OP, they’re just being really rude. Idle chitchat, forbye! (in trying to fish around for something to say, they’ve unwittingly [hopefully] hit on a very rude thing to comment on)
Heh heh-- that reminds me of the only time I ever willingly “vandalized” library property. (I am, surprisingly, still not horribly ashamed of this.) I’d taken out a bunch of B.C.-tourism related videos, and one of them was a crappy production intended to be fobbed off on visitors to Whistler. It was billed as “B.C. – through the eyes of an eagle.” There was an establishing shot of an eagle, followed by a bunch of helicopter footage of tourists spending money golfing, sailboarding, stuff like that, all strung together with the most idiotic and insulting narration can imagine. It began with the assertion:
“MAN WAS BORN WITH EYES JUST SIX FEET OFF THE GROUND.”
So I spliced in a couple seconds of a horrifying scene from Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom in which a fully-grown man is “born” in a hospital setting. It looked like it hurt. Take that, Tourism B.C.!
You’re absolutely right, and I’m sorry if I came across as suggesting otherwise. My point was simply that lots of women do have gender preferences, and having them doesn’t make them immoral or anything. I guess I got in a huff over the insinuation that women with strong preferences shouldn’t be having kids, because that’s just as presumptuous and rude as any passing comment about someone else’s pregnancy, IMHO.