For seven years, I lived inside a quiet kind of hope that slowly turned into something heavier. It wasn’t just the waiting, or the appointments, or the way every month felt like a verdict handed down in silence. It was what that waiting did to us.
Michael didn’t just want a child. He wanted a son.
At first, I treated it like a phase, the kind of thing people say before life teaches them better. He would talk about baseball games, about “carrying the family name,” about a future that had already been decided in his mind. I would laugh it off, remind him gently that children don’t arrive as custom orders.
Sometimes he laughed too.
Sometimes he didn’t.
Once, after another failed appointment, he said it plainly enough that I should have heard the warning in it.
“If we go through all this and end up with a girl, what’s the point?”
I told myself he didn’t mean it. I told myself stress makes people say things they don’t understand. I told myself a lot of things, mostly because I wanted peace more than I wanted truth.
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