Things You Don't Tell Your Kids

Heir No. One has been running around for the last few days talking about his imaginary sister, Kelsey. He doesn't know, and I'm not going to tell him just how much this hurts me.

After we had him, I wanted to be a father again, only I wanted a girl. When Mrs. BiW got pregnant with heir no. two, I was hoping it was a girl. It was not to be, and the first ultrasound made this fact abundantly clear. I'm not disappointed, BTW. He is so much like his mother that he is just a sheer joy to be around. Grins, laughs, dancing, happiness. He is joy personified 93% of the time. I hope he never loses that, even as he has to do more with the world, and becomes more frustrated by his speech. I see the things I love about his mother in him in nearly everything he does. Little guy is cratered on my side of the bed even as I type this.

For a multitude of reasons, all of them good, or at least understandable, there has never really been a question of having another, and so one of those quiet desires that never relly goes away, but lingers like a dull ache at times of reflection will always be unfulfilled. I can't really tell him how much it hurts me to hear him talk about it, and I'm not going to. He's come too far in the last year for me to do something that might make him stop expressing things. He's more important than something that was apparently never meant to be, and so I'll stick with the little twist in the stomach, and little or no tell on my face when E mentions her to me.