Abigail is walking toward me across the bright pavestones of the town plaza, petite hipster-chick in tow, an emissary from the elite club I'm about to join: mothers with more than two children. The raised eyebrows of the single- and double-childed majority make us seek each other out for brief sanity-confirming, or perhaps sanity-reviving, exchanges. Those mothers with their singlets and pairs sit relaxed on shaded benches, taking their picnic breaks from the day's errands. This plaza serves the exact purpose some long-ago town planner had in mind: it's the hub, the gathering place where we watch each other's lives unfold. In one corner, disaffected teens pretend to an urban sensibility, while sprawled under the big evergreens are the few familiar homeless faces. In the concrete center, spots of glare bounce off neon helmets as preschoolers practice on their first two-wheelers and preteens balance on carefully scuffed skateboards. A pack of kindergarten-aged boys, including my own two, are busy conquering the public art with a game of King of the Sculpture, a tall totem from which they hurtle into the damp grass with endless repetition. In a small community like this, everyone is watching after your kids, and everyone knows your business. I'm right in guessing that Abigail has already heard the news that the swell in my belly has been spied on, discovered to be a girl. Like me, her first two are boys, and she's coming to commiserate.

"Ever since she was born, everyone keeps saying to me: 'You finally got your girl,' as if that's what I was hoping for, as if that's why I had a third," mourns Abigail behind her large-framed glamour sunglasses.

"Well, you know, they think we're just crazy for having a third, so they're looking for a reason," I suggest vaguely. I never remember the clip-ons for my glasses, so I'm squinting in the sunglare.

"I mean, I love her, and I love that she's a girl, but no more than I would love a boy, and love that he was a boy. I don't feel like I 'got my girl,' so now I can stop having kids." Abigail is baffled and exasperated by these comments.

"Yeah, I know," I pretend to agree. "I would almost be relieved if the ultrasound were wrong and this one's a boy, because we feel like we know what we're doing with boys by now. " I am lying outright. I squint off in the direction of the gamboling boy-pack, relieved by the excuse not to have to try and meet her gaze. We blather on a bit about society's preoccupation with gender, etcetera, but I'm not really paying attention. I have preoccupations of my own.

Prior to the ultrasound, the pregnancy seemed fraught with gender-related tension, the world populated with gender-obsessed "well-wishers." Acquaintances would adopt a salesman's pitch about the benefits of raising girls, as if I could somehow make a post-conception decision: let there be girl, and so it would be. My vague 'we'll be thrilled with whatever we get' was more than once met with disbelief, and an unexpected urgency of tone: 'but girls are so much fun!' As if I didn't already feel enough pressure.

I was the one who wanted this third (fourth) child. And it wasn't so I could try for a girl, at least not until after the fact. I just wasn't done yet, not ready to decide: okay, that's it. So I alternately pleaded, cajoled, and waited, until I got a green light for another pregnancy from my partner. Of course, once I was pregnant, I was plagued by second thoughts—'buyer's remorse,' we call it, the distinct feeling that the new sofa you couldn't wait to get just takes up too much space in the room, the fabric is wrong, you can't believe you already spilled juice on it and can't return it to the store. What was I thinking? This was going to mess up everything: my new career, our intricately-worked childcare arrangements, my sons' happiness, my marriage. It was a tiny, living wrench thrown into the works of our lives. Over and over, nauseous and cranky, I asked myself: what was I thinking?

But if, by some generous miracle, the baby were a girl, it would all make some sort of sense. In some mysterious, gender-determined way, the wrench would come alive, twist its cold metal into a softer shape, and transform us all with it. We wouldn't just be having another child, we would be doing something we hadn't done before: raising a daughter.

This time, I wanted to know. I have read enough anti-medical propaganda to believe that routine ultrasound is probably not a wise use of the technology, especially just for curiosity's sake. I wished I weren't so well read. Our other kids were all surprises, even the son with whom we had several medically-advised ultrasounds—we declined the knowledge when offered it. But this time, I wanted to know. With our second son, I felt a pang, just a pang, but one I remember well enough to feel guilty about, of disappointment at the moment of his birth when I was told: he's a boy. This time, I wanted to be prepared, to be ready to love the inevitable boy the very second he came out. So when I had some preterm contractions and spotting, I jumped at my midwife's suggestion of an ultrasound.

The poor technician didn't know what she was getting into with us. We went to our small town's small hospital, and as I sat in the row of welded chairs that serves as an all-purpose waiting area, my turn for the ultrasound machine was delayed by an ambulance driving in. My legs crossed tighter and tighter as twenty minutes turned into an hour. Before we even entered the tiny sonogram room, I was already overwrought simply from waiting in a public place with an overly full bladder and the knowledge that I hadn't been doing my Kegels nearly enough. The technician focused on first things first: length of cervix and location of placenta – all good. Then she let me get up and pee, which should have dissipated much of the tension. Next comes the fun stuff--time to measure all the little parts, and the inevitable, obvious question: did we want to know? It's amazing how something which feels so weighty can be answered so lightly: sure, okay, yes. She made no promises, gave us the standard disclaimer, and an instant later said, 'it looks like a girl.' I burst into tears, seemingly literally—I was lying on the table taking a pretended scientific interest in the proceedings, and then I was taking up the whole room with my sobs.

I pulled it together quickly enough, but we could tell the technician was a little bit afraid of the emotions she had unleashed in the closet-like, darkened room. She knew, really, nothing about us. The form I had handed to her said that this was my second pregnancy, that I had given birth to one child, that I was twenty weeks pregnant, that the woman with me was my partner. There's no place on any forms for the whole story of our family, so she didn't know that before my first pregnancy, my partner had already borne two children, the first of whom was born dead. She didn't know that our first child was a girl, a delicate, long-haired, perfect girl who never drew one breath. She just knew that for us, the declaration of gender was big, big enough that she would decide to check it over and over again, between each other measurement. She didn't want to be wrong this time. Each time, yes, it still looks like a girl.

Once the initial shock wore off, I immediately went into denial. The ultrasound machine was so old it didn't even print pictures, it was the lowest level, it was just our little rural hospital, which struggles to pay its bills, a place to go for a broken arm, not for anything high-tech. Once offered the possibility, I was terrified of being disappointed. If I was really having a girl, it would be a redemption of sorts, for having gotten pregnant in the first place. I would be giving my partner a daughter, not a replacement for the one we lost, but a chance to let go of the generalities of the grief, and let it shrink into something particular, individual to Cedar.

For six years, we ran after our boys on the plaza and from the corners of our eyes watched the mothers of girls, watched them putting their daughters into frilly dresses and eschewing frilly dresses in favor of gender-neutral jeans and t-shirts. We watched them teaching their daughters gentleness and strength. We watched them helping their daughters stand up to boys on the playground and dress their baby dolls. We watched and watched, from the other side of an invisible, impenetrable window of longing and loss. We were supposed to be doing all that, reading the books on raising strong girls, not just the ones about raising gentle boys. The container of our grief, the world of girls, was just so vast.

Of course, it's also scary to let go. If we no longer grieve for decisions about frills, are we grieving for Cedar less? If every girl we see doesn't cause a twinge, will we forget her? It's the eternal question for the bereaved: if we let in happiness, does that mean we no longer love the one we lost? And so, with the foreknowledge of the (probable, possible) girl growing, we wonder if she will grow between us. If we can both let ourselves love her with abandon. Plus, there's always the fear. For us, boys live, girls die. Totally irrational, but totally true, until now. This one keeps on not dying.

The comments continued throughout the pregnancy, the pro-girl cheerleading that eventually sent me into the passive-aggressive mode of responding with a confidential tone guaranteed to quelch enthusiasm: "A girl would be nice. My elder son, he keeps saying, 'I hope I get a sister who doesn't die this time.'"

*****

She is born, alive, and we find ourselves in the strangeness of feeling like we have no idea how to do something that we've done twice already. There is an unspecific but vast disparity, as if she's not a different gender, but a different species than the boys. Just to spite our beliefs in the "nurture" influence of gender difference, this child Zari sets a different tone from day one. We actually had no idea that there were people out there who didn't walk their babies up and down the hallways for half the night, every night. We were in a bizarre twilight zone: we had a baby and we were getting plenty of sleep. Which was good, because as expected, there were some complicated emotions to navigate.

Like the clothes. Theoretically, I believe in gender-neutral clothing; I put the boys in dresses when they were little enough to let me ("Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something just because you're a boy," I'd say.). But my mother laughs at my plans for a boy-clothed Zari, reminding me how much I hated wearing my brother's hand-me-downs, leaving them in the bureau in favor of the laciest, princess-est dresses my grandmother would make for me. And the truth is, I really do enjoy little not-too-cute girl clothes on her, to balance out the boy stuff. I find a couple of dresses at the consignment store and buy some tiny woolen tights. My partner can barely look at her at first--the dresses bore a hole right into her grief, and it spills out again and again. I back off, then put the dresses back on—we'll have to work though this, better now than later when she's more aware of what's going on. I don't want Zari to feel bad about being a girl, or choosing traditionally feminine clothes if that's what she wants. Until now, I've felt that this girl was a gift to my partner, but I become less sure.

And then there's the whole, larger than life, mothering-a-girl thing. Suddenly, I feel that I'm supposed to heal all my old gender-related wounds so that I can walk my daughter into womanhood intact and unscarred. But those wounds are deep and I'm spending most of my energy just trying to get healthy food on the table and earn enough money to pay one of our mortgages. I tell her she's pretty, and I tell her she's strong and smart and capable, and I hope that for now that's enough. And just as I try to hold a space for my partner's grief, she holds me while I worry that I'm not up to the task of mothering a woman-to-be. We move from day to day, grief and fear and, yes, joy, all flowing through our family as the months (and laundry) pile up.

At fourteen months old, my daughter, temporarily diaperless, pees on the kitchen floor as I am trying to get through a bowl of already-cold soup. This is a familiar occurrence: the boys did it often, after which they would dance in the pool of urine and track it around the house as I chased them with a rag. But Zari, before I can even put down my spoon and get up, has toddled off to the changing table and returned with one of her cloth diapers. She bends over and wipes at the mess, with surprising effectiveness. I shrug off the heavy cloak of exhaustion that I wear most afternoons, and follow my daughter into the bathroom, where she pushes the wet diaper into the pail. For just this moment, I let go of the angst associated with raising a woman in this so-called post-feminist world, I let go of my struggle against genderized generalizations, and for just this moment, I revel in her difference from the boys, in her idiosyncratic cleaning-up-after-herself girl-ness. I reach down for her naked body, pull her up into the cradle of my neck, and nuzzle her, murmuring gleefully, "Who's got the girl? Who's got the girl?" I swing her up in the air over my head, letting the cascade of giggles shower over me. "I've got the girl. Mama's got her girl."

Kenna Lee-Ribas co-mothers three children and works as a hospice nurse in the liberal paradise of West Sonoma County, California.