Millionaire’s Family

Editor’s Post by Deborah Hetrick Catanese

I often think back with a smile about my visits to my obstetrician’s office during my second pregnancy. Because I was an older mom, I had some tests done to check on the well-being of my baby.  The results not only revealed a healthy baby nestled inside, but also my baby’s sex. And that was where the fun began, since I asked the kind folks at my wonderful doctor’s office to keep the part about the sex of my second baby a secret from me.  I wanted a natural childbirth, which included the surprise at the end.

To a person, the office staff all told me afterwards that keeping this fact quiet was extraordinarily difficult for them. They presumed that having a boy was exactly what I wanted, since my first pregnancy produced a lovely angel of a girl in the form of my dear Christina, almost three at the time. Yet they all tried to respect my wishes, and it was amusing to me to watch all of the nurses and doctors visibly dancing around the subject. And how they tried to fish around casually to see which way I was leaning.

“Are you hoping for one sex or another?” my dear Dr. Morris Turner would say, trying to ask me with one of those forced neutral looks on his handsome, caring face.

It made me smile to know they all had the answer, yet I didn’t want it. And I held firm to that, my right to not know!

“Nope,” I’d say. “I love surprises!”

Or, if I was in a less playful mood, I’d actually explain by saying, “I don’t want to be disappointed by setting myself up for wanting one over the over.”

That was almost the truth. The full truth was I didn’t want to get my hopes up for a boy.   I didn’t want to be disappointed if another beautiful girl was my second blessing. So I refused to articulate this inner desire to anyone, including myself.

As the due date neared, my desire for a boy was beginning to bubble up inside me, beyond my determined control.  But I tried to squelch it inside myself, thinking, “How could I get THAT lucky?!”   So I pushed that desire back inside me, again and again, but it was like trying to force bubbles back into the soda bottle. Yet I tried to keep it all bottled up until the very moment I heard Dr. Kisner say in the delivery room, after a remarkably short but hard and heavy labor, “He’s perfect!”

I had never heard the phrase “Millionaire’s Family” until that day 24 years ago when my beautiful bouncing baby boy Brian arrived like a freight train, a totally different entrance to the world than the more gradual arrival of his sister.  Since then, I have heard the phrase “Millionaire’s Family” many times, from other members of our fortunate club. And over all these years, I have reveled in the differences and the joys of having “one of each”.  It is a blessing that no amount of money could buy.

What makes YOU feel wealthy beyond measure?

Fashionably yours,

Deborah