Would it have been a boy or a girl?

A year ago around this time, I wanted nothing from life except work. And I made it that way for years.

I filled my days until there was very little room left inside them. I answered emails late enough that the timestamp began to feel like evidence. I stayed up for long after the rest of the house had gone quiet, laptop light against my face, a glass of water untouched beside me, telling myself that exhaustion was discipline and discipline was recovery. I mistook long hours for success because success was measurable. I didn’t know how to measure grief. I don’t think I was mature enough.

No one really tells you what happens after a miscarriage once the immediate sadness has passed. They tell you to rest. They tell you what your body may do. They tell you when the bleeding should stop, when your hormones may settle, when you can technically return to normal. But normal is a strange word after your body has briefly become a place for someone else.

What no one tells you is how much feeling waits for silence. When the calendar is full, grief has nowhere to sit. When the calls keep coming and something is always due, you can outrun almost anything for a while. The danger arrives in the quiet kitchen after midnight. In the shower when there is nothing left to solve. In the five minutes before sleep when the mind stops obeying and begins opening drawers you had carefully kept shut.

So I became very good at keeping the lights on.

I called it ambition.

Some of it was.

Some of it was fear.

I did not want to examine what had happened closely enough for it to become real in a different way. I did not want to wonder who that child might have been, because wondering felt like constructing a room for someone who would never enter it. I did not want to become tender toward something I had already lost.

I also did not know if I was allowed to feel my loss. My therapist once said to me, once you decide that it’s yours, you become a mother. I wasn’t ready to hear that.

So I turned to work and somewhere along the way, avoidance became a very comfortable place before it became my hell. It had deadlines. It had invoices. It had professionally worded emails sent at unreasonable hours. It looked productive enough that no one thought to call it grief, including me.

But bodies are patient with us in ways minds are not. Eventually mine began asking for something other than endurance. At first it was small. I wanted to sleep before midnight. I wanted to eat dinner sitting down instead of beside a keyboard. I wanted to walk without listening to anything. I wanted an afternoon that did not have to justify itself.

Then, gradually, I began allowing thoughts I had refused to touch.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been a boy.

I think about the peculiar tenderness women have for their sons, the way mothers describe watching a small boy become taller than them and somehow still seeing the child whose hand once disappeared inside theirs. I imagine little shoes left crooked by the door. A backpack dropped in the hallway. A boy pretending not to need affection while quietly drifting closer on the couch. I wonder what it would have felt like to raise a gentle man in a world that so often mistakes gentleness for weakness.

And sometimes I wonder if it would have been a girl.

That thought frightens me differently.

I imagine loving a daughter and suddenly understanding my own mother with unbearable clarity. Watching my heart leave the house wearing shoes. Wanting to protect her from things I would eventually have to let her learn herself. Watching her become beautiful and complicated and stubborn and separate from me. Knowing there would be rooms I could not enter, people I could not protect her from, heartbreaks I could not negotiate for on her behalf.

Perhaps motherhood is partly agreeing to let your heart develop wings…

For a long time, I could not let myself imagine any of this. Baby videos appeared on my screen and my thumb moved before my mind had time to register them. Pregnancy announcements could turn an ordinary afternoon into something I had to privately recover from. I was happy for my friends, genuinely, but sometimes happiness and grief occupied the same body so awkwardly that I did not know where to put either one.

That has changed.

I notice it in insignificant moments.

Now I watch the baby video.

I can smile at a little hand closing around a finger again. I send congratulations without needing to recover afterward. When friends tell me they are pregnant, my happiness for them arrives cleanly more often than it arrives complicated.

And occasionally I still wonder.

Boy or girl.

Whose eyes.

Whether they would have liked to read as much as I do.

The difference is that the question no longer destroys the rest of the day.

I used to think healing would mean never wondering at all. Now I think healing may be the ability to wonder without following the thought into the dark.

I’m not forgetting.

I’m also not overcoming.

I think I’m just becoming spacious enough that grief no longer has to be locked outside in order for joy to live here too.

A year ago, I believed the safest thing I could do was keep moving.

Now I can sit in a quiet room, let the light change against the wall, think briefly of the child who did not become one, and remain.

And I no longer want to run away anymore.