With one boy already and a firm commitment to having only one more child, my husband and I decided it might be quite fun this time around to know in advance the gender of the baby we were due to have at the end of the year.
While neither of us had strong feelings about wanting one flavour over another and our main priority was simply for a healthy baby, the unspoken consensus as we showed up for the 20-week anatomy scan was that a girl might be quite nice, thanks.
An hour later we sat in a cafe with an envelope in front of us which would tell us in one short three- or four-letter word what sort of family dynamic we could expect for the next 20 years.
My husband opened it.
Or I did.
I confess to feeling so highly charged emotionally that I actually can't remember.
We read the word at the same time: BOY. In capitals. Obviously.
Because all of a sudden we had a future mapped out for us that was going to be all about boy-ness, not just in capitals, but in bold font.
The moment will absolutely go down in my personal history as one of the most significant, and definitely the most peculiar. How can it be that one can feel overwhelmingly, heart-stoppingly excited and happy and yet at the exact same instant feel like a tidal wave of disappointment has just washed through?
Those three letters suddenly transformed my somewhat clinical regard for our generic "baby" (I would say "foetus" but it's just an icky word) into a maternal one for our boy, our wee man, our future little dude.
Yet it was hard not to mourn for the tutus that would never be bought, the hairclips that would never hold back long girlish tresses and even the ghastly hat that might have been worn at some distant point in the future when I was mother-of-the-bride.
I was to be a mother of sons, a lone "X" in a family of "Y"s. Rugby boots would litter the hallways, that musky smell unique to teenage boys would permeate my home and I would get calls from my adult children every other month instead of every other day.
It was a blow.
Or was it?
The short-lived grief for what might have been washed over me and then away, leaving behind it a clean slate from which I could imagine our family's future; one pile of die-cast cars instead of a matching one piled high with Barbies, one lot of blue baby clothes instead of another new one coloured pink, one trip to the rugby field on cold Saturday mornings instead of dashing off at half-time to the netball court and one talk about the birds and the bees which wouldn't even be had by me.
Most important of all, though, was the thought of two little best mates building driftwood forts on the beach together, and sharing a friendship in the special way only brothers can.
It would be a good life, my life with boys, and as the cherry on top I'd have the family tutu and hairclip budget to myself.
- Eva Bradley is a photographer and columnist.
