Where is that third? “He really wants a son, but I don’t want more”

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Fanny (41) thinks her family with daughters Anne (10) and Brechtje (8) is complete. Husband Rutger (39), however, knows no better than that there is still a chance of a son.

Fanny: “Rutger would have loved to have had a son, he has never hidden that. When we had a gender-determining ultrasound performed on Brechtje at fifteen weeks pregnant, he was tense in the car in the car. ‘A son and a daughter, how nice that would be,’ he kept repeating. I felt everything that I was pregnant again with a girl and found it difficult to tell him. Who knows, maybe I was wrong and his big dream would come true.

A son

Less than half an hour later we left the midwifery practice with a beautiful series of ultrasound images in our hands. Photos clearly showing two labia. I loved it, two daughters. I sensed a slight disappointment with Rutger. Of course he was delighted that everything looked good and that the baby appeared to be completely healthy, but since he knew I didn’t want more than two children, it also meant to him that he would never be in the stands with his own little guy. the ArenA would be – his ultimate dream image.

Rutger parked the disappointment very quickly, I must say. He devotedly painted a second children’s room in very sweet colors and when Brechtje lay in his arms, I saw nothing but love. “Real men make daughters,” he would invariably shout to his friends or others who noticed he had two girls. I could tell he was, as my grandmother would call it, “talking the holy spirit down his throat.”

Now or never

There was still that longing for a boy, especially when his brother had a son three years ago after two daughters. I wouldn’t exactly call Rutger jealous, but he looked at it with some envy. ‘Great man, I want this too’, he said every time we saw his brother. From that moment on he also started about a third. Brechtje had just started kindergarten a few months ago, I finally had my hands a bit free again and I didn’t have to think about starting all over again.

“He looked with envy at his brother, who did have a son”

“It’s now or never,” he initially tried to convince me. I was then 38 and also understood that I did not have eternally fertile life. Oddly enough, I was quite susceptible to that argument. What if I regretted? This is something you cannot reverse, at a certain point the stock of eggs is simply gone.

On the other hand, you don’t reverse the arrival of a child either. What if I regretted that? According to Rutger that was impossible. “Nobody regrets having a child,” he insisted. I was going to love it and that period of dependence, so in diapers and a thousand bottles a day, would fly by – or so he told me.

Up to forty

My cousin had a baby; a picture. I held the boy in my arms and smelled his face. ‘I want this again, Fan’, Rutger whispered in my ear. He caught me in a weak moment, a smart move. On the way back from that maternity visit, he didn’t talk about anything else. I found it very endearing.

“If we don’t worry too much about it and just see if it’s been given to us again,” was his proposal. I’d stop the pill and we’d let it run its course. I had to think about that for a while. We normally have sex about six times a month; what were the chances that it would be exactly on the day of my ovulation? I also thought it was an exciting idea.

‘Okay, we’ll do it, but we’re really not going to obsess about it. If it doesn’t come, then don’t’, I said a day after that conversation. And if I wasn’t pregnant before I turned 40, it would stop. Rutger thought it was a great idea. It wouldn’t all go that fast, I thought. And before I knew it I was forty and we could tick this off again.

Crying in the bathroom

Two months later I was pregnant, I knew it immediately because of the nagging pain in my breasts and that sick feeling in the morning. Trembling with nerves, I took a pregnancy test, without Rutger. I wanted to process the message myself first. The result was not long in coming; two lines immediately appeared on the screen. I cried all by myself in the bathroom. Now I couldn’t go back.

“I have been crying hard on my own in the bathroom. Now I couldn’t go back”

Back to the consultation office, the nursery, swimming lessons and even longer that schoolyard. And another nine months of misery, because I’m not such a nice pregnant person. Then there’s the birth and those months of insomnia. I was sorry, yes. And I felt guilty about that fruit in my stomach. You will only have a mother who thinks that way about you…

Rutger was overjoyed and wanted to tell the girls right away. I let everything flow over me a bit, in a way I was in shock. This was his party, in my opinion. Anne and Brechtje’s reaction was so sweet and genuinely moved that I also felt something of joy for the first time. That didn’t take long.

Read also – Merel had another boy after 3 boys: ‘I cried at the ultrasound’ >

Letting go

I lost blood in the ninth week and had a miscarriage at 10 weeks. That affected me enormously, both for me and for Rutger and the children. I really needed to recover physically and mentally. Rutger immediately wanted to try again, but I lay down for that. I couldn’t bear it going wrong again in such a short period of time. I needed time and luckily Rutger gave me that time too. He was very sweet to me and very concerned. I just burst into tears out of nowhere. Bizarre how that works, for something you didn’t actually want.