Sage Said So: "Dahlia has a penis"

This was all Jayne's email said––a follow-up to our conversation earlier in the day about the ultrasound that would inform her of her third and final child's gender.

In elementary school, Jayne and I decided that when we grew up, we'd have girls at exactly the same time and name them Dahlia (Jayne's daughter) and Aliya (my daughter), pronounced AH-lee-AH, to rhyme with Dahlia. We've talked about our daughters as absolutes ever since, with the same giddy bravado-blinders that got us through the hell that was our high school.

With Jayne's simple sentence, "Dahlia has a penis," my heart struck a minor chord. 30 years of our shared, suspended-disbelief vision for the future melted away to our finite, disparate realities of now. Jayne, mother of two, soon-to-be-three boys, is not likely to ever have a girl. And I, childless and of "advanced maternal age," have no idea what the fertility and fate gods and goddesses have in store for me. In other words, there will be no Dahlia + Aliyah as Jayne and I planned.

Of course, Jayne and I never truly expected for life to work out precisely as we intended. But that shared vision kept something alive in us. Tonight as I sat out in the quiet of my moonlit backyard with Jon, a circle of beloved dogs and cats at our feet and in our laps, my heart stretched far wider than I ever thought I'd survive, I tilted my head up toward the vast granary of stars and spoke my gratitude for the dreams nurtured by old friends. How much more pleasurable the impossible can become when it is shared with love over the years.