My husband, Aaron, and I have been together for eight years, and from the very beginning we dreamed of having a big family. We talked about it on our second date, sitting in a booth at a diner outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, splitting a slice of cherry pie. He wanted four kids at least, maybe five. I laughed and said he’d better be ready to change a lot of diapers, and he said he’d change every single one.
But there was one thing Aaron wanted more than anything, and he never pretended otherwise. He wanted a son. Even before we got married, he talked about it constantly, in a way that was sweet at first and then, slowly, became something I didn’t know how to name.
“I just can’t picture it,” he told me once, the night he proposed, as we sat on the dock at his family’s cabin on Lake Michigan. “Only daughters. I mean, I’d love them, obviously. But I need a boy, Meredith. Somebody to carry on the Bowman name.”
I remember the way he said need. Not want. Need. I remember thinking it was an odd word for a man who had everything else he wanted sitting right beside him on that dock. But I was twenty-six and in love, and I put it down to tradition and family pride and moved on.
