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Having a son went from a dilemma to being the most valuable lesson of my life

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I've always been a feminist. I'm lucky. My mother, Jane Caro, is a feminist, as is my grandmother, and both always have been. It's something I've never questioned and always felt confident and strident about. Just ask me about it at a dinner party (if you dare...)

Motherhood has been quite a confronting experience for my feminism so far, and I'm sure it will continue to be. Ever since discovering I was pregnant it's been a process of adjusting and reconciling my biology with my ideology, particularly when I discovered that my baby, my most-beloved Alfred, would be a boy.

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I had never wanted a son. I wanted daughters, probably because I am one of two daughters and six granddaughters, no sons or grandsons. This seemed altogether to fit in with my feminism better. It was more comfortable to me. But when the sonographer pointed out my son's dangly bits in our 19-week scan, it was clear that I was going to raise a son. The anxious feeling I had about this daunting prospect lasted a few weeks as I came to terms with why I felt the way I did and how I could let it go.

There were two parts to the feeling: I had to mourn the life I thought I was supposed to have, the elder daughter of my two girls (why do we plan things we cannot control?!), and I had to come to terms with having a relationship with a son that I had never really considered. There were dark moments in the middle of the night (when all those dark thoughts come), when I felt sick with worry thinking about how I would go about raising a son. 

But I know what these thoughts were now. They were a manifestation of the same feelings I've had a few times over the past year. In this patriarchal world, this world where even the best men (and women, for that matter) engage in casual and ingrained sexism, how will I raise a son who respects me the way a daughter would? Who sees women as just like him? As just human beings?

I look at my gorgeous baby boy and my love for him swells my heart, but makes we worry whether I, as his mother, will be able to counter the devaluing of women that is obviously so prevalent in our world.

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People are constantly telling me "boys are easier" to raise (casual and ingrained sexism, anyone?), but I think they are much harder. How do you raise a white, middle-class boy not to think his own experience is the default experience of the world?

How do you counter a society that makes things easier for him than for others, and make him see it? See how it is for women, for people of colour?

Raising a boy who maintains the status quo sure would be easy, but I refuse to be satisfied with that. I will raise a feminist boy. Just like his father and grandfathers before him, but even better. I will point sexism out to him at every turn, and he will never get away with it without being called out. I will show him that girls are just people like him and that products and art targeted at them are no less valuable or enjoyable. He will be immersed in feminism by a family who models it in their everyday life.

A girlfriend of mine with a son (she had struggled with similar feelings), said something that stuck with me when I discovered my baby would be a boy. She said that she thinks it is sometimes better for women who wanted girls to be mothers of sons. We love women so much we wanted daughters, and so we will raise sons to love and respect women. By having sons, we do feminism a great service.

I think she's right. But I would add that, by being feminist mothers, we also do our sons a great service. And I wouldn't swap my beautiful son for all the daughters in the world. He is my sun, moon and stars, and he will teach me far more than I will teach him. Clearly, he already has.