My name is Meredith Bowman. I’m thirty-four years old, and I’m a pharmacist at a hospital in Grand Rapids. Aaron is thirty-six. He sells commercial roofing for a company his grandfather started in 1961, the company his father ran for thirty years and that now has the name Bowman & Sons Roofing painted on the side of every truck.
Bowman & Sons. I didn’t notice the significance of that sign the first time I saw it. I noticed it a lot later.
We got married in June, eight years ago, at a little Lutheran church in Holland, Michigan, with tulips in every window. Not long after, I found out I was pregnant. I took the test on a Saturday morning in our tiny apartment, and when I came out of the bathroom holding it, Aaron dropped his coffee mug on the kitchen floor.
He was over the moon. He picked me up and spun me around the kitchen in my bare feet with the coffee spreading across the linoleum. That afternoon he went to Target and came home with a tiny Detroit Lions onesie and a little foam football. “For when he’s old enough,” he said, and he set them on the dresser in the spare room like a promise.
Part Two: Four Daughters
We had a girl.
We found out at the twenty-week ultrasound. The technician moved the wand across my belly and smiled and said, “Looks like a little girl.” I looked over at Aaron. He was smiling too, but his smile had gone stiff at the corners, like a photograph held a second too long.
He loved her, of course. When Hazel was born, seven pounds, two ounces, with a full head of dark hair, he held her against his chest in the delivery room and cried. He walked the halls with her at three in the morning and sang her old Bob Seger songs off-key. But a week after we brought her home, I found the Lions onesie and the little foam football in a box on the top shelf of the closet, and I knew he’d been hoping for something else.
“Don’t worry,” he told me that night, rocking Hazel in the glider. “We’ll give her a little brother someday.”
So we had another baby, two years later. Another girl. We named her Iris.
I watched Aaron’s face at the ultrasound that time, and I saw the disappointment cross it like a cloud moving over a field. It was there for only a second before he covered it with a smile and squeezed my hand and said, “Two princesses. Lucky me.” But I’d seen it.
Then came our third daughter, Clara, and eventually our fourth, Maisie. Four girls in seven years. Our little house in Kentwood filled up with pink sneakers and hair ties and the sound of four voices shouting over each other at the dinner table. Every spare surface held a drawing or a Barbie or a half-finished craft project, and I loved every chaotic inch of it.
I adored every one of them, and Aaron was a loving father. I want to be very clear about that. He coached Hazel’s soccer team. He learned to French braid from YouTube videos, badly at first and then pretty well. He read bedtime stories in four different voices. On Saturday mornings he made pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse, and he let all four girls pile into our bed to watch cartoons.
But whenever we found out we were expecting another girl, I saw that familiar disappointment on his face. It never stayed long. It was always there.
After four pregnancies, I was honestly exhausted. My back hurt all the time. My body didn’t feel like my own. I was working three twelve-hour shifts a week at the hospital pharmacy and coming home to four children under eight, and some nights I fell asleep at the kitchen table with my head on a pile of unfolded laundry.
After Maisie was born, I told Aaron I thought we were done. We were sitting on the back porch after the girls were asleep, watching the fireflies over the lawn. I said I was tired. I said four was a lot, and four was enough. I said we had a beautiful family.
He was quiet for a long time. “I know,” he said finally. “I know we do.” Then he said, “But what if the next one is a boy?”
I didn’t answer. I just looked out at the fireflies, and I wondered, for the first time, whether he would ever be satisfied with the family we already had.
