I walk into the dim-lit room, my hopes opening the door for me.

This whole experience has been different, the sickness, the carrying, the exhaustion, the weight gain, almost none at all, and I caught myself thinking in these days before knowing, It’s a girl. Surely it’s a girl.

And now comes this day my suspicions will be confirmed, and I wait in the light of a screen to hear, my hopes sitting softly on my chest, because even though we say it out loud that gender doesn’t matter, this one does.

This one, the last one, matters.

This baby, of course, would be our girl. We knew it, so we tried again.

And then the doctor checks that heartbeat and all those other pieces and asks, You sure you want to know?

And yes, of course I do, because I plan to shop on the way home for her first dress and a headband to match.

Boy, she says, and my heart drops all the way to my toes.

Because this isn’t something we considered, because who in the world ends their family line with six boys and no daughters stretching behind?

The doctor, who has delivered all my boys, turns back to her computer screen, chuckling about this revelation, and I’m glad she’s not looking at me because I’m wiping away tears I can barely feel, and the whole room spins hazy and blurry and suffocating in a way I don’t understand, because this is a baby, for God’s sake, my baby, and why can’t I just be happy about a baby?

Why does finding out the gender of this sixth and last feel like a dream slamming in pieces on the ground, when I know how delightful and charming boys can be and how much they love their mamas and how we already have all the clothes and gear and bedding we could possibly need, if a little worn and ragged after the use of those five who came before?

I say the only words I can find. Wow. Poor Ben. He’s going to be so disappointed.

And what I really mean is Poor Rachel. She’s so disappointed.

I walk out that door with my hopes dragging the floor behind me.

///

It’s something little girls like me dreamed about growing up, without even knowing we dreamed about it. I saw glimpses of it when I brushed the hair of my dolls or braided it down their backs or cut my sister’s hair in a layered bob.

Someday I would do this for my daughter, that was the unspoken knowing. I would brush her hair and braid it down her back and trim what needed trimming.

That desire for a one-day daughter showed up early in my little girl life. Maybe it’s because I had an amazing mother. Maybe it’s because she had an amazing mother, too, a mother she called every few days about something her kids did or some advice she needed or just because she needed to talk to someone who understood her. Maybe it’s because of that old picture, five generations of women lined up like stair-steps, me at the tallest top.

I wanted a daughter to put in that picture. I wanted a daughter to sit in my lap and play dolls with, if that’s what she wanted. I wanted a daughter who would call me on the phone every few days to tell me about something her kids had done.

I’ve wanted a daughter since before I could even voice that want.

So I took that pregnancy test for baby #2, and it turned positive, and I shopped for girl clothes.

Because, of course it made sense, one boy and one girl. And then that sonogram told me differently, so I packed away all those girl clothes and tucked away the name, because I knew there would be more.

And there were, number three and number four and five together, but they were all boys and those clothes sat still waiting for a daughter who did not come.

///

It’s only a quick trip to the store, because we already have all these clothes, but I need some candy as a consolation prize, since I know how at least two of my boys will react to the news of another brother, and all that way home I don’t turn on the radio and I don’t talk to anyone on the phone and I don’t talk to anyone at all.

I just sit and think, trying to reconcile what I’ve learned today with my expectations.

And then I walk in the door at home, and all those boys are waiting to hear, and I stand behind a camera to film the reveal with their daddy and my mom and only three of the five, because the other two are napping and wouldn’t really know what they’re seeing anyway.

They dig in the brown bag and pull out the wrapping and their daddy tears it apart, and there it is.

World’s number one brother, it says.

The oldest starts crying, because he’s been waiting for a sister through five of them, and I cry right along with him, behind a camera, pretending I’m really just laughing at that expected reaction.

A brother will be fun, his Nonny says.

No he won’t, he says. I’ve had lots of experience.

Experience that sits a megaphone on the kitchen counters so we can dole out instructions above the constant noise, experience that rips holes in every wall of our home, experience that brings anxiety to the back of a throat when I open the refrigerator that’s empty even though we just got groceries three days ago.

I have lots of experience, too. I know what to expect, and it is not what I wanted this time.

///

There was a daughter who died.

We didn’t get to meet her, but the day of her dying is forever etched in my mind. A doctor’s office. A machine that showed no movement of life where there had been before. A hospital that took her from the parts of me that could not let her go.

I always thought there would be another.

I dream of her sometimes—this daughter we named Amarise because it means given by God, because we didn’t want to use the name that waited and still waits for a daughter who lived.

Every now and then she comes to me when I sleep, and she touches my face with one little hand and stares at me with those summer sky eyes, and then she races away, her brown-red curls flying.

I wish we had given her that name we’d saved through all those boys before her.

///

It’s in those moments when a friend posts a beautiful picture of her baby girl and those times parents talk about last year’s daddy daughter dance and when moms share about their girls’ weekends with their daughters that I feel it the most.

It’s when I watch my friends with their daughters, the way their mama eyes light up when their daughter walks into a room, the way those little girls hold a piece of their mamas in their eyes and smile and walk.

Because everywhere I look in my boys, I see their daddy.

And this isn’t a bad thing, not at all, because he’s a good man and a loving daddy and a doting husband, and if they can be anything like him when they grow up, the world will look much different than it does today.

But I don’t get to see a piece of me walking around, not really, because they walk like him and talk like him and think like him and play like him and jump like him and fly like him, and I don’t always understand their ways or their feelings or their anger like I imagine I would understand the ways of a daughter.

All these days after learning gender, disappointment punches a hole in my heart that bleeds a little every time this new baby boy moves and every time I see that swelling in the mirror and every time I think about another bundle of pure energy racing in a game of indoor tag with his brothers, even though it’s against the rules.

In my most unguarded moments, I think about how my husband has all these sons to pass along his name and his legacy and that picture of how to be a man, and I will not have this gift, because there is no daughter who needs a name or a legacy or a picture of how to be a woman.

There will never be that daughter.

///

Maybe we shouldn’t have done it. Maybe we should have been happy with the five. Maybe we should have just adopted.

Because they all think we’re crazy anyway, in this society where two is the national norm, and what in the world were we thinking?

These thoughts shake me weeks after learning the gender of our last one, because there is another that attaches to them: After all, what was the point?

Guilt chases that one hard.

The day before Father’s Day this year, two people I love watched their twin boys slip into the world too early. They watched those boys fight and claw to find air in lungs that had not yet formed, and then, an hour later, they watched them slip into the next world.

We have a picture of them, blue babies wrapped in the same blankets all my babies were wrapped in. They couldn’t even open their eyes to see their parents before they died.

And then, just a month later, one of those I loved helped her sister-in-law deliver a baby boy born without a brain, his face collapsed almost into his neck. She watched her nephew fight for a life that could not be, just like she watched her babies.

I don’t forget all of this in my disappointment. I couldn’t. I see it when I close my eyes, because I know this is a baby and it doesn’t matter boy or girl. It matters healthy and strong and alive.

We are a few months from welcoming the next boy to our pack, and still the disappointment lingers at the edges. Maybe it always will.

But excitement has begun peering in, like a friend, just waiting to be welcomed, because we know the truth of this boy.

We know he was given by a God who sees the end instead of just the beginning, by a God who believes another Toalson boy is what the world needs, by a God who stretches a mama heart wide and long and deep so it can enfold all those little boys destroying her home.

Destroying her life.

Because they are the ones who rearrange my world in just the ways I need, and this one will be no different.

It is my boys who strip me of control and throw around that chaos like it’s a plaything and turn a whole life inside out, and it is my boys who are tearing me into pieces and putting me back together right and whole and more beautiful than I was before.

They teach me how to be a woman. How to be a mother. How to be me.

Now one more will join their ranks. One more will love like a hurricane, uprooting and stripping clean and remaking. One more will turn me toward who I was always meant to be.

This baby, this one who was not what we expected, he will join his brothers in a wild, courageous, strong tribe of boys, and he will be wanted. Welcomed. Needed.

We wait eagerly for him, this number six, this number last, this boy named Asher Ruben.