So, What’s Wrong With Another Boy?

Some things, women know.

As the species’ more intuitive half, we understand the moon’s messages, the tide’s seductive pull and, of course, pregnancy. Through some magic, we can read the signs that answer the eons-old question:

Boy or girl?

From the start, my new pregnancy looked and felt utterly different. And I knew that after two sons - and years of tripping over plastic swords, assorted rubber weaponry and sharp-edged action figures - I was going to have a daughter.

I knew it was a girl from the weird, new way some foods tasted. From the unfamiliar way I smelled. From the half-dozen women who looked at my swelling form and announced, “It’s a girl,” because, they explained, I was “carrying high.” Boys ride low.

So I was primed for the phone call last week bearing the results of my amniocentesis - the nearly always correct genetic and sex-revealing test taken by many over-35 moms-to-be.

“You’re going to have another baby boy!” trilled the voice on the line.

Because I’m adaptable and highly spiritual, I replied, “What a wonderful surprise! Another son!”

Actually, I shrieked the expletive that the guy in “The Crying Game” must have thought upon discovering that his “female” lust-object was equipped with that which only guys possess.

Then I laughed. Mostly at myself, for forgetting that if fate has given me a motto, it’s Boys R Us - as my three brothers, two sons and a lifetime penchant for surrounding myself with males proved.

I kept laughing. At having produced a black ‘90s version of “My Three Sons.” At my best friend’s insistence that my womb is The Citadel, an institution to which girls need not apply. At another pal’s announcement that she’d found the perfect macho name: Ebola, a moniker that’s “both virile and virulent.”

After laughing for hours, I stopped. And was stunned to discover I was devastated.

“It’s a boy,” I kept saying. “Another boy.” After months of nausea, weariness and impossible weight gain, you’re going to have …

A boy.

So, what’s wrong with that? I asked myself. Your baby is healthy. Your husband - who also wanted a girl - is happy. You adore your two sons. Your disappointment boils down to two shallow things:

Clothes and hair.

I longed to encircle my baby girl’s downy head with one of those ridiculous elastic “headbands.” To weave braids tied with satin bows. To abandon royal, midnight, sky, baby, electric and cobalt blue, and actually buy … pink!

But it’s a boy, I scolded. Get over it!

Suddenly, I knew how. After learning I was pregnant, I’d bought a tiny, navy blue (blue!) velvet baby dress. Hanging it on my bedroom closet doorknob, I’d touched it, dreamed on it.

I would take it back. Buy something for a boy.

In the infant’s department of a favorite store - a thicket of sprigged dresses and flowered straw hats - I settled on a mint-green, Winnie the Pooh sleeper. I loved it.

Outside the store, I choked back tears.

It wasn’t just about clothes and hair. It was about spirit, too, about wanting someone with whom to share my childhood poems and books, the names and scents of flowers; nut-brown dolls with hair to comb and dresses to change.

My sadness spoke to some shared essence of femaleness, of difference, that I’d missed as a girl without sisters and a woman in a houseful of guys. Some magic, I felt, was to forever escape me.

I drove home in a fog. Later, my brother, whom I’d called with the news, said, “Don’t beat yourself up - let yourself grieve a little.”

Two days later, I awoke to see a doll I’ve had for years, dressed in her customary frilly pinafore. On her feet were the newborn-size “Chris Webber” Nike sneakers that my 9-year-old insisted that his little brother - a future ballplayer, like him - must have.

And I saw a mint-green sleeper, hanging where a velvet dress used to be.

Staring at the sleeper, which resembles one worn years ago by my 13-year-old and then by his baby brother, I was steeped in memories of my sons’ fresh smell when they were new.

And I realized that in all my musing about boys, I’d lost sight of my boys. The ones who still kiss me, tease me and tell me their secrets. Who, at great personal risk of being seen, actually agreed to accompany me to the movie “A Little Princess.”

The boys, who one day will be just as nurturing to some woman’s lucky little girls. Who’ll be loving husbands and fathers, like the man who has given me my newest little boy. I’m sure of it.

Some things, women just know.