On Envying the Parents of Girls

I don’t really have any friends who are mothers. I know a few fathers, but their kids are way younger than mine, entrenched in phases I can barely remember.  Just being parents only buys so much bonding.  If I ever were to develop a friendship with a mother though, I’ve always imagined her not to have girls.  She would have to be stuck with boys like me.  It’s an assumption based on a suspicion:  mothering boys and mothering girls are such fundamentally distinct experiences that whatever common ground is shared by simply mothering gets canceled out by that difference. Ok, maybe not canceled out, that’s extreme.  But dampened.  Very very dampened.