So you laugh.

You laugh at let’s hope the next one’s a boy while holding your newborn daughter, and in laughing you agree, a little, to the thing underneath it — that she is a lovely first draft, and the family is still hoping for the final version.

I laughed at a hundred of those over twelve years.

Each one was so small.

That’s how it works; no single one is worth leaving over, and the smallness is exactly the trap, because you keep waiting for the big clear cruelty that would justify a scene, and it never comes.

It just arrives in these tiny deniable increments until one day you look at your two daughters and realize they have been raised, gently, amid much laughter, inside a house that considered them a disappointment it was too polite to name.