Thoughtful Thursday: Names

I’ve never been so happy to see a new month arrive. For many people September means back to school, but for me it means that my babies were not born in August. (Still in the hospital, all doing okay.) Here are the Intelligentsia (people who have commented on every Thoughtful Thursday post for the month of August).

Wiseguy from Woman Anyone? continues her Perfect Attendance Record of 8 Intelligentsia memberships.

Kristen from Dragondreamer’s Lair is also working on a Perfect Attendance record, with 6 straight months of Intelligentsia status.

Jill from All Aboard the Pity Boat and Photogrl from Not the Path I Chose brought apples for the teacher and are back for the fourth time.

Jules from Just Multiply by 2 and Lost In Translation from We Say IVF, They Say FIV have shown up for another round, ready with new lunchboxes and pencil cases.

The new students in the class are Ana and Birdless.

Good morning, class. (all together: Good morning, Baby Smiling.) Please be seated, time to begin.

Last week, after my unexpected hospitalization, I referred to a Thoughtful Thursday topic that I’ve had in the queue which was very appropriate but too hard for me to address at that point. Instead, I took the easy road and we all dredged up the worst days of our lives.

I’m ready now.

At what point did you pick out baby names? When did/would you assign a name to a particular baby? Is there concern about “wasting” a name on a baby who will not come to be?

If there’s one thing infertiles have, it’s time to pick out names.

DH and I have had a girl’s name set in stone since college, before we were married, before he was DH (DB for Dear Boyfriend?), more than a dozen years ago. It is a perfect name meeting all of my criteria: beautiful, meaningful, not derived from a boy’s name, unusual but not impossible to spell or pronounce (my real name is impossible on both counts, and I would prefer to spare my daughter a lifetime of correcting people). And no, I’m not telling you what the name is.

The boy’s name we’ve only had picked out for a decade.

I’ve never assigned a name to an imagined or real embryo (aside from nicknames like “gummy bear”). My past pregnancies didn’t get names, because they weren’t far along enough to know the baby’s sex. If I had known the sex before losing them, I don’t know what would have happened with naming.

In my mind, once I knew the sexes of these babies, I assigned them the names we had chosen. But, I have said them out loud to myself only a few times, even fewer times when talking to DH, and never to anybody else. (Remember the part where I said I’m not telling the names?) Sometimes when I communicate to the fetuses through thoughts or loving whispers, I use affectionate variations of the names, but never the actual names.

DH is even more mum, and even my use of affectionate nicknames derived from the names seemed to make him uncomfortable. The only time I’ve heard him speak the names aloud during the pregnancy has been when we were settling on middle names and we were trying out the combination. (We’ve known that the boy’s name would be some variation of a specific name for a decade but not which exact name until a few months ago; the girl’s middle name has been undetermined the whole pregnancy but a couple of days ago we finally narrowed it down to two possibilities.)

Certainly, part of our silence comes from Jewish tradition not to name a baby before it is born and past a crucial window of the highest infant mortality. That millenia-old tradition fits with the general stance DH and I both have not to count our chickens before they hatch (quite literally, in this case). I know lots of people who call the fetus by name throughout the pregnancy, but it just doesn’t feel right for either of us. And, I think we would both have that stance even without having experienced loss or infertility. I just don’t think we’re the kind of people who’d have the baby’s name written on the cake at the baby shower. In fact, we’re not even the kind of people who would have a baby shower.

Staff in the hospital are constantly asking me the babies’ names (family have tried as well but have given up, knowing that I never budge), and I always have to reply that we’re not telling. If they press me on my rationale for silence, I skip the religious explanation and jump straight to the dead baby reasoning. That shuts them up instantly. Oh, what perverse pleasure I take in jostling complacency.

Even though we don’t say them out loud, the babies seem to have been officially assigned the names we’d long ago picked out. But, in the back of my mind, especially after last week’s preterm labor scare, I’ve wondered whether they would keep the names if they didn’t survive. This is the thought I couldn’t bear to think last week when I put off this Thoughtful Thursday topic.

For the boy, part of the concern about “wasting” the name on a dead baby is that the name honors DH’s grandfather (same first couple of letters, but different names). What does it mean to honor someone with a name when the name can’t actually live on? Would the next son, if I ever had one, get a name to honor both his great-grandfather and his brother? Would he start over with an entirely new name, just as if his brother had lived?

Those are not questions that I can answer right now, and I desperately hope I never have to answer them.

For now, my precious babies have the precious but unspoken names we chose for them before we even starting trying to conceive. As each day goes by with the babies safe inside, I have more and more trust that they will get to keep their names after all. Not that I’m purchasing any name plaques or monogrammed towels or anything — none of that until the chickens actually hatch.

At what point did you pick out baby names? When did/would you assign a name to a particular baby? Is there concern about “wasting” a name on a baby who will not come to be?