“All I want is a healthy baby”? On gender disappointment after a loss.
When I found out I was carrying a boy, I burst into tears. I’m deeply ashamed of this now, but all I felt at the time was a sense of betrayal by the universe. I was supposed to be having a girl. I was supposed to get my daughter back. Instead, I was going to have a truck-loving, bug-finding, sports-playing boy who I would have no idea how to relate to, and my “spirit baby” Sloane had was not coming back to me.
I had gone with my mother to the OB’s office that morning, where I picked up the envelope that would tell me if I was going to have a son or a daughter. I’d had a special, early test done to find out if my child had genetic abnormalities, since my first baby, a daughter, had died in utero from Trisomy 21. The test also had the perk of letting you know the sex of the baby by the end of the first trimester. It was the silver lining of my loss — not having to bide my time until 20 weeks to choose a name, to design the nursery, to know whether to buy pink or blue.
My mother was breathless with excitement. As I dropped her off at her house so I could go home and open the envelope with my husband, she leaned back into the car to show me her crossed fingers, chanting “X, X, X, X, X, X.” Everyone in the family wanted a girl — there were already 3 grandsons, and as my mother put it, she wanted to “knit pink.”
When I walked into the house, holding that envelope, I felt almost angry with the intensity of the moment. My husband and I sat on the couch, facing each other, and I handed it to him to open. I closed my eyes and held my breath, trying desperately to clear my mind of all thoughts and wait for my fate to intrude on the silence, one way or the other. I tried so hard not to anticipate what he would say. I heard the glue tearing away from the paper as he opened the envelope, and then, his voice hitching just a bit with joy and shock — “it’s a boy!”
I held it together enough to breathe out the name we had chosen for our son. I forced a smile, trying so hard to pretend I was happy. I looked down at my phone and texted my mother his name, with lots of exclamation points to show how pleased I was.
My husband watched me carefully. “Are you ok that it’s a boy?” he asked.
“Of course!” What kind of mother would I be if I wasn’t? “Riley!” I repeated his name again, like a mantra.
But within a few minutes, I was weeping on his shoulder. “He’ll love you but he won’t love me! We won’t have anything in common!” I wailed. And then — “I really thought it was Sloane.”
So much for my mother’s instincts. They had failed me again. I had spent the period in between my pregnancies obsessively reading about “spirit babies,” convincing myself that my daughter had simply needed a little more time before she came into this world. She had just gotten cold feet and had retreated back to wherever it is that babies go when they’re waiting to be born. But as soon as I got pregnant again, she would come back to me.
To make me even more convinced of my theory, I felt like I saw her name everywhere I went — as the authors of books I would chance upon, as the name of a consulting firm a friend of mine worked for, even the name of a toilet company that had its product in seemingly every office and airport across the country. How could that be anything but a sign?
And yet, I was having a son. Not Sloane, but Riley. Not the spirit of my daughter, but an entirely new little person. I had been wrong all along.
My intense guilt was worse than the disappointment. After you lose a baby, you’re not supposed to care about the sex of your child anymore. You’re supposed to pray for a healthy baby and be happy with “whatever God gives you” if you’re lucky enough to bring that baby home. In short, you’re supposed to know better. But no matter how much I fought it, that simply wasn’t true for me. I wanted a daughter, and I was distraught that I wouldn’t have one. I was even more distraught that I’d had one, and she’d been taken away.
Almost two years later, I’m absolutely in love with my son. I can’t imagine him not being exactly the little boy he is. I totally buy into that whole special “mother-son bond” that boy moms talk about. Riley loves books and animals just like me, and surprisingly, his obsessions with vehicles, rough-housing, and playing in the dirt amuse rather than bore me. But I still get nervous when I think about having a second child, because I expect it will be a boy — and I don’t know if I’m reconciled yet to never having a girl, to having lost my one and only opportunity to know what it’s like to mother a daughter, to not being the one to give my mother and mother-in-law a granddaughter.
I haven’t decided how much I judge myself for this yet. I know I’m not alone, and that gender disappointment is a very real fact of pregnancy and probably even parenthood for some. How many stories have you heard of couples trying again after 2, 3, even 4 sons or daughters, in the hopes of getting the opposite sex? It doesn’t mean they don’t love the children they have, but dreams die hard. They die even harder for loss moms, who have invested life and death into the vision of their child (gender included). And yet somehow we’re still supposed to be above it all. And I want to be, but I’m just not quite there yet.
