There are a few moments in your life when everything changes, and the world careens around an unexpected corner. Sometimes the mystery around the road’s view is a gaping chasm of fear or pain or perhaps both. If you’re lucky, like I was this week, the mystery around the corner is an incredible gift. A moment when everything I’d been thinking or believed was tossed to the wind, but what was left before me was wholly new and wonderful. A moment when my life snapped into a different focus than I thought, but one I believe will be more clear than any vague future fog I had mapped out in my mind’s wanderings.

We are having a little girl. A beautiful, gorgeous little princess. I always thought that moniker was cliche, but now that I know I’m going to have a daughter, that is exactly how I will treat her. Cradled with a gentle hand of comfort. Every time I thought about having a child in my imagination, it was always a boy. I suppose that’s natural. My mother is outnumbered by my father and my brother and me, so I guess I just sort of expected that genetic pattern to continue. A girl is different and exquisitely so. Something new for my segment of the family tree.

I’ve always heard that a woman becomes a mother the instant she discovers she’s pregnant, but a man doesn’t become a father until he holds the baby in his arms for the first time. This was seemingly true for me, until I discovered that I’m going to have a daughter. In a great crash of insight the circuitry in my brain has been suddenly rewired, and the fathering instinct is kicking in. All I want to do is protect my little girl. If we were having a boy, I’d probably already be preparing myself to take the boy hiking and to play with pellet guns and kill innocent woodland creatures, then toss a baseball at his head and say things like “Good One, Son!” Now, I’m sensing the picture of myself with the shotgun rocking back and forth keeping young teen lads from getting anywhere near her. But that’s way too far off to be thinking about now. Now, I simply want to meet her and see that face. Lord I hope she looks like my wife.

The doctor gave us a 97% chance it was a girl, so we’re running with it. Next week we’ll have an anatomy ultrasound to confirm. For now, excluding my two male cats, it’s seems like males in my little family are outnumbered. I’m ecstatic about it. My first born will be a daughter.

“Thank heaven…for little girls…”