After what seemed like a thousand years, our scrawny little baby reluctantly emerged from the torture chamber he had created in my womb and Anthony, on seeing a penis in large proportion with the rest of our baby’s size, yelled, “It’s a boy!”
It’s difficult enough being pregnant and giving birth, without the pressure of a spouse wanting ‘it’ to be a boy. Would it have mattered? No, of course not, but still – mmm.
After the last ultrasound before Menzies/Ming was born, I pleaded with our doctor to tell me if “it” was a boy or a girl, but he wouldn’t. As the father of four daughters, our doctor told me to tell Anthony to grow up.
Well, 58-year-old first-time fathers can’t usually grow up, so to speak, because they have rather unsophisticated, almost primitive, patriarchal instincts.
If Ming had been a girl, we were going to call her either Jean (after Anthony’s mother), or Meg (after my mother), or a combination, but we only had a single name for the potential boy and that was Menzies/Ming.
I am not sure if it is the photo of Anthony cradling little Ming in his arms, or my memory of it, but it was, to use one of Anthony’s phrases, “bloody beautiful.”
After Ants went home, I stared and stared at this wonderful little baby and could hardly comprehend how he was mine. I held him close to my heart and I could feel his own new little heart beating against my chest and I felt as if the whole of my life had meaning.
And then little Ming began to cry.
jmgoyder 
It must have been a wonderful moment despite everything that went before.
If Ming had been a girl it would had made little;difference.
❤