“It’s…a girl.”

“This is a healthy female foetus.”

“I’m sorry, what? Like, a girl?”

“That’s what I said.”

I glared at the gynaecologist as my wife lay, heavily pregnant, between us on his strange machine. We had come to him for a detailed scan after our doctor found something during his check-up.

“I think it’s a boy, but something in the scan is worrying me,” our doctor had said. “You are already in your late thirties, and this is your first child. Let’s not take any chances.”

So, we booked an appointment at the specialist gynae. As we waited, worried, I bought a rugby ball.

Now Dr Fancy Scanner told us our first, and likely only child, was a female foetus. A girl.

Back home we celebrated the news that our baby was fine, and I punted the ball into my neighbour’s yard.

I often think about that ill-fated rugby ball and what prompted me to buy it in the first place. More importantly, why the specialist’s pronouncement had bothered me so much.

Was my reaction telling of my true beliefs? Did they manage to reach the surface of my public persona through the small fissure created by the doctor’s unexpected news?

Popular psychology certainly thinks so. “Take off your masks and face the true you!”, “You are just an agent of the patriarchy!” they scream on TikTok.

It could be true, says the work of the brilliant experimental psychologist Frederic Barlett. You have certain schema (a term he contributed to the world of psychology) that lie much deeper than what the public perceives in that well-crafted LinkedIn post about the value of diversity in the workplace.

Quite possibly, says the work of Nobel Laurette, Daniel Kahneman. With fiendishly clever experiments he showed how you impulsively act on deeply held beliefs and only, milliseconds later, engage the rational part of your brain to justify our actions, or quickly hide them from public view.

No, said my wife. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a rugby ball is just a rugby ball. “Now go and find a place that sells cheap nappies!”.

Whatever the truth, that fissure remained. Just big enough for a small girl to crawl straight into a grown man’s heart and head.

As our daughter has grown, our house, including my office and workbench, has become her domain. It’s all dolls, dancing, and diaries, and instead of a rugby ball, we have a much more well-rounded netball to play with.

Like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, I try to lay down the law. “Remember, Daddy’s work desk is off limits!” But like his daughter Scout, mine seems to know which boundaries she can cross.

In any event, the sacrifice of mental and physical space has been a willing one, not least because she adds a bit of the romantic to the mundane.

A Sunday braai at home, for instance, is dollied up with flowers from the garden, a host of dolls and plush toys at the table and wine glasses full of Coke – a reminder that the everyday is really all there is and should therefore be savoured, even celebrated.

In the same vein, finding a bunch of crudely drawn sketches on my keyboard is a welcome reminder not to take everything so darn seriously. At least not those things that happen in the digital world where we spend so much of our time.

What is worth taking seriously, and this she taught me well, are our true feelings.

All kinds of emotions flow freely through my daughter’s tear ducts. Emotions triggered by movies and books, when our rescue cat kills a mouse, when we surprise her with a gift or on the eve of an important test. All without any hesitation or shame.

With the irreverence of an only child, my daughter has tried to get me to contact this long-forgotten inner world. I am told to “use my words” to explain my frustration or to “talk through” an incident where I snapped and caused her to cry. Talk and talk and talk some more.

And so, 10 years after I was caught off guard by the doctor’s comment, I am a better man. I know this, because I have just received a kiss on the forehead. Rugby balls be damned.