When my friend began a sentence If I had known how it would be, I was certain that she’d go on: I would never have had a child. But I would have tried to have at least one more was what she actually said.

Once upon a time, faced with a child that mystified or repelled because of some trait—illness or disability, lack of affection, bad behavior—parents were only too willing to believe that their real child had been stolen and that the thieves (according to many folklores, most likely devils or fairies) had left a replacement that was really a troll or a devilkin or some other nonhuman thing. Imagine how many times the myth of the changeling has been justification for child abuse: corporal punishment, neglect, abandonment, infanticide even.

Any notion that my friend’s daughter might have been accidentally switched at birth was easily scotched: She had her mother’s fine blue eyes down to the gold rings around the pupils. The same heart-shaped face, the same bowed legs, voices that couldn’t be told apart. But I remember hearing my friend say it more than once: If we were living in the Dark Ages, I’d swear the kid was a changeling.

When pressed, an exasperated sigh. She just doesn’t feel like mine.

Which never failed to chill me.

And when she made the comment—if she’d known how things would turn out she’d have tried to have another child—that too chilled me. But I thought I understood. If she’d had another child, and if she succeeded in having a better relationship with it, wouldn’t that prove that it wasn’t all her fault how badly things had turned out with her daughter? I understood. Or, at least, I tried to.

She would also insist that everything would have been different—meaning better—if her daughter had been a son.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard, begins one of the twentieth century’s most famous novels. Often this comes to mind when I hear people talk about their messy lives, especially about their unhappy families.

There was a father, of course. Or rather the ghost of one. They’d been in the same crowd all through high school, and at the end, briefly, just before he was drafted into the army, a couple. When he returned from the war they had tried but failed to make a go of it. The daughter had been, my friend confessed, the result of break-up sex.

We knew it was over, she said. But we weren’t angry with each other, and I had no idea when I was going to have sex again. It was me who insisted on one last time.