It was at the twelve-week prenatal exam that we learned we would be having a baby boy.
If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said the usual mantra pregnant mothers chant: As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex. But after the doctor told us the baby was a boy, I realized that I did care. I really cared. I had a whole list of girl names picked out and not one for a boy. When we went to a baby store, it was the pink section that drew me. I wanted the experience of raising a girl and a boy, of understanding the difference between having a daughter and a son. And, although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, some irrational part of me wanted to replace the daughter Marius had lost in his divorce.
Rada’s mother remarried only a few months after Marius and I and, in a twist of irony that could not have been lost
on Marius, moved with her new husband to the United States. Marius had limited visitation rights, and we saw Rada rarely before she left. Still, there were enough visits for Marius to spend time with his daughter, for me to get to know her a little, and for Adam and Rada to become friends. Over the next decade, Rada would learn English, go to American public school in Connecticut, become a beautiful, whip-smart, and very American girl. Her life would be different than it would have been had she stayed in Bulgaria, and Marius often said that, as far as Rada was concerned, everything had turned out for the best. And yet, even as we began our life together, I felt a stab of remorse. We’d fallen so hard for each other that we hadn’t considered the damage we’d done. Our love had transformed our lives; now, it would change our kids’ lives. Rada would live with the results of our actions, as would Adam, and no matter how selfishly happy I was, I couldn’t stop feeling that our love had been born out of destruction.
In the strange logic of my love for Marius, I believed that if I could give Marius another daughter, he wouldn’t miss Rada so much. It was a naïve and foolish way to think, and I would never have articulated my feelings as such, but some part of me believed that I needed repair the damage done. And so when I learned that we would have a son, I felt strangely unsettled, as if reality was somehow incorrect. I developed a powerful resistance to the facts. The doctor said it was a boy, but in my mind, the baby should be a girl. It was the same magical thinking that would come to characterize my years of marriage to Marius: I knew the facts, but I didn’t really let myself believe them. I was living in a state of mind that allowed me to deny the truth, even when that truth was as plain as the nose on my face.
“Doctors are not always accurate about these things,” I said, as we drove through Sofia. “Especially at only twelve weeks. There’s a chance he’s wrong.”
“He seemed pretty sure,” Marius said. “He saw a penis.”
“But I was sure it would be a girl,” I said, disappointment in my voice.
“The baby will be beautiful,” Marius said. “No matter what.”
“Of course it will. I’m not making sense. I must be hormonal. As long as it’s healthy, I don’t care about the sex.”
“You know, there’s a Bulgarian superstition that says if you walk under a rainbow when pregnant, the sex of the baby will change.”
“There’s a superstition for everything here,” I said, laughing. Just the other day, Yana told me that if you put your purse on the ground, the money will disappear from inside. Not that it will be stolen, not that you’ll get a hole in the bottom of the bag and it will fall out. It will actually materially disappear. Poof. Yana never, in all the years that I knew her, put her bag on the ground.
“We just need to find a rainbow,” Marius said.
***
To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
***
Rumpus original logo and art by Max Winter.