cherryberry, please stay. It's very, very difficult for people who haven't suffered gender disappointment/preference to understand how it blindsides you. You haven't actively chosen to feel this way. It does not make you wrong or insensitive or ungrateful. It makes you wonderfully human. It's so easy for people to say 'well you shouldn't feel this way' or 'you should have thought it through' but it displays a lack of empathy and an ignorance of the human condition. Humans are desperately affected by emotions they don't expect and this particularly happens when having children. It's an emotionally fragile time anyway and you cannot help investing thoughts in the way you do. Don't leave. There are many women on here who've been there I promise you. Perhaps with a couple of very, very rare exceptions you'll find that they all say the same thing in the end. You love the child you get.
I promise you that the way in which you adore your child won't be bound up in the gender. I always troll out the example of my BIL and SIL. One is a professional ballet dancer, one plays rugby for England and it's not the way round you'd expect. The person you create is so much more than the sum of its parts. I have a little girl and I absolutely adore her but you won't get her to play anything other than Spiderman or Ninja Turtles. She's filthy most of the time and yesterday collected a lot of slugs from the garden and asked if we could keep them as pets. She is so much bigger and so much more brilliant than the fact of her gender. As are all children. But I know you can't process that now. You will when the time comes to have this brand new baby.
I sometimes think it's better to find out if you have a preference. Because the final weeks of the pregnancy you can start naming your child, buy outfits, refer to him or her and it takes away the pressure of 'the right reaction' on the day you deliver. Not that the reaction is ever what you worry it might be anyway.
If you are finding this really hard to deal with and tentatively acknowledge where these feelings are coming from, please talk to your midwife and request some extra help. No shame in that. Like I said, you're emotionally fragile and when having a baby that's something that needs extra attention and perhaps resolving as much as possible before it becomes something else entirely.
Chin up lovey. Mumsnet is a wonderful, wonderful place. We can probably all agree that trying to have and having children is a powerfully emotive time. It's impossible to talk about it without great emotion and I understand why it's hard to separate your own feelings and experiences from somebody else's. People are just hurt and that's understandable. The road to fertility is sometimes an utter bastard. But you have done nothing, nothing, nothing wrong.
Stay, gwan. It's Friday soon and everybody gets drunk and silly. You don't want to miss it.