After five sons, my wife finally got the daughter she had dreamed of. But when our baby opened her eyes, Claire went pale — and whispered something I couldn’t explain.
Our house had six voices louder than any television, and most nights I fell asleep to the sound of at least two of them arguing about whose turn it was in the shower.
I was thirty-four, the father of five boys, and the husband of a woman who had wanted a daughter since long before she wanted me.
“I just wanted one.”
“Five boys,” Claire said with a sigh one Sunday, folding a mountain of small striped socks. “This has to be your fault somehow.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.
Our oldest was ten, our youngest two, with three more boys in between.
“I just wanted one,” she said to me once, in the dark, after our fifth son was born. “One little girl on my side of the house.”
“I went through a difficult period.”
“We have a whole team.”
“I know.” She turned her face into the pillow. “I know.”
She rarely talked about her own family. Her parents, Margaret and Robert, lived less than an hour from us, and I had met them exactly once, at our wedding.
“Why don’t we visit them?” I asked her, early on.
“We don’t.”
“Why not?”
I stopped pushing.
“I went through a difficult period after high school,” Claire said. “They didn’t handle it well. That’s all.”
That was all I ever got.
I hated answers like that.
Give me a problem, and I wanted the whole thing laid out in front of me so I could do something about it.
But Claire had drawn a line around that part of her life, and eventually I stopped pushing.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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