I have been thinking about this for a long time, probably since I learned that my first child would be a boy.
After we had Conner and got pregnant the second time I hoped with all my heart that the baby would be a girl. How awesome would that be! We already had a name that worked for both a boy and a girl, I was already daydreaming of the beautiful dresses she would wear, the way I would do her hair every morning and as she got older start worrying about the kind of boys she would date. But when it was time to find out we learned we were having another boy. See, I have quite a few friends and family and lots of other moms I know who have a boy and a girl. And when I first learn that they’re having a boy and they already have a girl and vice versa, and can’t help but be jealous and disappointed and never be entirely happy for them.
After doctors found out what the exact diagnose was, they took a blood sample from everyone in our family and we got tested for it. Genetics is very complicated, but basically Ben and I are silent carriers of the disease, Conner was fully carrier and Dallas is a non-carrier. Every time we have a baby there is a 25% chance the baby will have what Conner had. After much consideration we decided we couldn’t do that to another child knowing what we know now. Of course modern medicine offers different options, like separating the cells and identifying the genes that would cause the disorder and remove them (or something like that, told you genetics is complicated!) but we didn’t want to go down that route or any other.
And so at 26, I had my last baby. And he was boy. She never came.
It was not an easy decision to make and I was very sad for a long time, but I’ve come to terms with it. For the most part. We talked about adoption and perhaps that will happen sometime in the future, but Ben will start Med School (if everything goes great) in about a year and a half and I would like to concentrate in my career in Nursing when Dallas starts his own school.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my sons with all of my heart, I can’t imagine my life without them but it feels like I’ve been cheated out of the experience of having a daughter. Who knows why that happened, and hopefully as the years go by I’ll stop feeling this way. But for now, this is how I feel.
I blog about married life, motherhood, being a CNA, living in San Francisco, trying not to forget Castellano and living after child loss. 
