Thoughtful Thursday: Quitter

Welcome to November. Wow, what an October I had. Anyway, here are the Intelligentsia (people who have commented on every Thoughtful Thursday post for the month of October).

Wiseguy from Woman Anyone? still holds the record with 10 out of 10 Intelligentsia appearances.

Close behind is Ernessa from Fierce and Nerdy, back for the 7th time.

Photogrl from Not the Path I Chose makes her 6th appearance.

Jules from Just Multiply by 2 and Lost In Translation from We Say IVF, They Say FIV are both four-peating.

Two-timers include Elana from Elana’s Musings, Mel from Stirrup Queens, and Stacie from Heeeeere Storkey Storkey.

(Discussion of infertility as well as baby issues ahead.)

I’m a big advocate of cutting losses. People tend to stick too long with things that just aren’t serving them well. For example, spending more on car repairs than the car is worth, or staying in a bad relationship because of all the years you’ve already invested. You started eating a cookie and you don’t like it? Throw the rest away!

Simultaneously, I refuse to be a quitter. Sometimes I take on challenges that are beyond me, then I have to keep going until I’ve seen them through. Household repairs, for example — I don’t even enjoy them, and in the four hours it took me to do that plumbing repair, I could have earned enough to pay a plumber to do it in half an hour.

Or, to use another example, infertility. I never got close to that point, but I think that if treatments hadn’t succeeded when they did, I would have kept going with IVF cycles until I ran completely out of money, the physical ability to continue, or time.

Now I am faced with a similar situation. A few days ago I alluded to having had a hard time lately [and many people were kind enough to comment or email with support, thank you]. There’s a lot of things contributing to it, but probably the biggest one is breastfeeding.

Put simply, breastfeeding is not going well.

Right after birth, I couldn’t nurse for quite a long time because the babies weren’t able to feed by mouth. Then, once they could start practicing, their level of prematurity meant that nursing did not come naturally to either of them. Tamale has nursing down quite well now, but for a long time her little cheeks got tuckered out very quickly. Burrito’s problems have improved but still continue even now that he’s in the full-term range. I love that little guy with all of my heart, but nursing him is not my favorite time together: biting, blocking his mouth with his tongue, and flailing his arms for several minutes each time before he can nurse properly really pushes me over the edge sometimes.

The biggest problem, however, is my milk supply. The culprit, apparently, is losing almost half of my blood volume during delivery. Plus, who knows if I ever would have had a full supply — many women can’t make enough for two babies, and some women’s bodies never make enough milk for even one baby. Sometimes I do everything right and pump every 2-3 hours. Sometimes I get frustrated and pump just a few times in a day. Either way, the amount of milk doesn’t seem to vary. I’ve seen many lactation consultants. I’ve tried fenugreek, which doubled my supply — but 2 times a tiny number is a slightly less tiny number. I’ve tried power pumping, which doesn’t seem to trick my body into making more milk the way it should. Nursing the babies directly doesn’t seem to make a difference, so at this point almost all of their feeds are by bottle, either formula or, once a day, pumped breastmilk. I produce enough for about 5% of their total intake. The only possibility left is to try to increase supply using strong drugs, but my emotional functioning is already so tenuous that I’m afraid I couldn’t handle the side effects.

I believe strongly in breastfeeding, for all sorts of reasons. I always envisioned that I would nurse for a long time (and that it would be idyllic, like people say). I’ve long ago given up on the hope of exclusive breastfeeding, and I’ve accepted that it’s not always fun, but pumping nonstop to yield only 5% is really frustrating. Several people have suggested that I give up, reclaim those many hours a day, and spare myself the heartache.

But, right now, I can’t. My body took so many years to create them, and my body couldn’t gestate them as long as I wanted, can’t my body at least feed them? Plus, I’m too wedded to not being a quitter. I should know better. I should be willing to cut my losses. Right now, I am stuck. My head and my heart both want to continue, but my head and my heart also both know that I should move on.

At some point, perseverance becomes stubbornness.

What are the limits of your perseverance — with family-building or with other realms of life? How much do you value not being a “quitter”?

Thoughtful Thursday: Stickler

By nature I am a detail-oriented person, and I take a lot of care with every kind of detail. I am well aware that not everyone else is so concerned with precision. When other people make an error, sometimes I can be quite a stickler, and sometimes I let things go. Strangely, the issues that get to me the most aren’t necessarily the ones that matter the most. Here are some examples.

Perpetual stickler:

• My name. My real name is impossible to spell and pronounce, and I have spent far too much of my life correcting people. The only times I let people use the wrong name are when I’m about to never see them again, as when my order is ready at Starbucks. Otherwise, I just can’t let it go. When I first met DH, he mangled my name, and I was so intent on correcting him that he thought I couldn’t stand him, and our relationship almost never got off the ground. Good thing we worked that out.
• Misinformation. Especially as it pertains to my profession, there are issues that I just can’t let slide when I hear someone say something horribly wrong. I try not to be bossy and know-it-all, really I do, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

Sometime-stickler:

• In the hospital both pre- and postnatally, the babies’ conception came up frequently. Quite a few times, a health care worker stated that the babies were conceived through IVF rather than IUI. Sometimes I was careful to correct them, when it seemed like the misinformation might make its way into the chart or otherwise stick around. Other times, especially when it was one practitioner talking to another rather than to me, I bit my tongue.
• Also on the topic of fertility, sometimes I hear people say outlandish things about infertility problems and treatments. Sometimes I feel the need to educate them, and sometimes I shrug and move on.
• The name of this blog. There is no “the” in the name. As I explained when I first started blogging, the blog name is a line in a Radiohead song. I realize that it doesn’t look quite right unless you know the song. I’ve seen lots of people add a “the” in their blogrolls, links to my blog on their blogs, etc. Occasionally I send someone an email with a friendly correction, but usually I don’t say anything because I don’t want to go around the blogosphere bossing people around. (But, if you have the name written wrong somewhere on your blog and now you would like to correct it, that would be lovely.)
• “Are these your first?” As in, “Is this your first pregnancy?” or, other times, “Are these your first children?” To health care workers, I carefully explain my two miscarriages. To everyone else, I evade the pregnancy part of the question and simply say that these are my first children.

Non-stickler:

• Tamale’s name. Burrito’s name, like the word burrito itself, is rarely mispronounced or misspelled. Tamale’s name, like the word tamale, has a few potential proper pronunciations (such as ta-MAH-lay and ta-MOLLY…) and many more mispronunciations (TA-muh-lay, TA-mail, ta-MAIL…). When I chose her actual name long ago, I had no idea that people would consider it as exotic as they do, and I had no idea that anyone would think to pronounce it any way other than the “right” way. Already in her short life, I have heard an incredible number of guesses as to the pronunciation. So far, I have been saying it properly to each person once, and then letting any subsequent mispronunciations go. As she grows up, I don’t want her to have the same visceral reaction to hearing her name misspoken that I do for my name, and I don’t want her to have to waste so much effort making people get it right. So what if a restaurant hostess or substitute teacher doesn’t say it right? I certainly don’t want her to be such a stickler about her name that she risks shooing away her future husband like I almost did. Some things are more important than the details being exactly right.

When are you a stickler? When do you let things go?

Thoughtful Thursday: Partner

As I mentioned in last week’s BBBB post, one of the biggest surprises since the Burrito and the Tamale were born has been the changes I’ve seen in their father.

Normally, DH is a highly emotional guy — mostly when it comes to unimportant things. When he watches sports on TV, his yelling has been known to send pets and neighbors running for cover. He shows uncommon enthusiasm in response to new flavors of ice cream and sunny days. Don’t even get me started on what happens when he sees a puppy.

In terms of negative emotion, he is usually very even-keeled. He gets worked up over abstract issues like government encroachment on civil liberties, but if something unpleasant happens to him personally, it’s like water off a duck’s back.

He is fiercely loyal and effusive when it comes to me and his friends, but less so with family.

His high levels of energy and emotion have made it all the more bizarre that over 7 years of infertility, he was almost always calm to the point of being blasé. He’d get riled up about the money or about minor inconveniences, but the big picture didn’t seem to bother him the way that it got to me. There were hints, but, like the physical toll of the treatments, most of the emotional toll seemed to fall on me.

During the pregnancy, he was phenomenal as far as helping me during the months of 1st trimester immobility and 3rd trimester home and hospital bedrest. But, when it came to the babies, I was disappointed at his lack of enthusiasm. The correct response to, “Do you want to feel the baby kick?” is “Yes!” Instead, he often answered, “I guess,” or even, “No thanks, not right now.” Instead of cooing at cute baby items, he questioned the cost. During every minute of each ultrasound my eyes were as wide as a kid’s on Christmas morning. Being in a dark room for an hour made DH sleepy.

I didn’t question what kind of father he’d be nor the kind of husband he’s been all along, but, during a supposedly happy time for which we’d worked so long and so hard, I found his reactions (or lack thereof) disheartening.

And then the babies were born, and all of the emotion burst out. Not the screaming-at-the-TV emotion, but the sweet, joyful, loving emotion that I fell in love with, a decade and a half ago. He marveled at the Tamale’s resemblance to me, chuckled at the Burrito’s antics, told them sweetly about the cat waiting for them at home, made up songs to sing to them in the NICU.

When I pointed out the contrast between his pre- and post-birth reactions to the babies, DH said, “We weren’t counting our chickens before they hatched. I didn’t want to get too attached. Now they are here, and I can love them.”

When I pointed out the contrast between his effusive reaction to the babies and his stoicism during infertility, he said, “Infertility was depressing! If I’d showed emotion then, it would only have been bad emotions.”

7.5 years of DH’s guarded emotions during IF and pregnancy in exchange for singing and dancing through the house for the next couple of decades? Not a bargain I expected to make, but I’ll take it.

How has your partner reacted to infertility/loss? Is this consistent with your partner’s typical style of emotional expression?

Thoughtful Thursday: Emotion

Quick health/baby update before we begin Thoughtful Thursday: I am feeling better and better every day; the percentage of the day in which I feel Human has gone from 0% for several days post-birth to 80% today. The Burrito and The Tamale are developing incredibly well — so well that we’ve been discussing discharge with the NICU team. Looks like just a few days until they come home!

Today’s topic follows from a question I submitted (and then subsequently answered myself) for this week’s Barren Bitches Book Brigade on It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather B. Armstrong of dooce.com. Since only a few people participated in the book club, I’d like to open the topic up for discussion more broadly.

On your blog, how much emotion do you express? Is that more or less emotion than you tend to express in real life?

From my BBBB post:

In real life, I am very guarded with emotional expression. On BabySmiling, I am considerably more expressive.

For years I have enjoyed Dooce’s monthly newsletters about her daughter. They combine snapshots of Leta’s growth, snarky humor, and pure love. I think that I will be comfortable expressing emotion directly to my children, but it feels strange to think of writing emotional public newsletters under my real name for friends and family (and strangers) to read. Do I save the emotion for BabySmiling, even though it goes against the mandate of the blog as an infertility blog? Do I write the letters privately? Do I remain guarded and let the emotions go undocumented? Probably not the latter, but I’m still figuring this one out.

To elaborate on what I wrote earlier this week…

I have never felt more emotion than in the past couple of weeks. Part of it is attributable to fluctuating hormones, sure. Some is attributable to having babies, the same as anyone. But a big part has to do with the realization of 7 years of infertility plus months of more-difficult-than-usual pregnancy. I am so filled with love, but there’s also a good measure of disbelief, overwhelming retrospective sorrow, hope, worry, wonder… And there you go. I am expressing emotion here on this blog. Emotions which most likely will never be expressed anywhere else, certainly not in writing.

I just don’t see myself writing gushy love letters to my babies under real name for my friends and — gah — family to see. But I am feeling that gushy love, so where do I put it? Here, where I never set out to mommyblog? Some sort of BabySmiling annex? Privately, for only my babies to see someday? I didn’t have an answer on Tuesday during BBBB, and I don’t have one today.

On your blog, how much emotion do you express? Is that more or less emotion than you tend to express in real life?

Thoughtful Thursday: Complete

Today’s Thoughtful Thursday topic can apply to any phase of the infertility/loss/adoption process, but I will focus on my own recent experiences of pregnancy and new parenthood after infertility.

To what extent is your blog a complete and accurate record of your life?

During infertility, I felt like Baby Smiling was my main outlet for truth. I flat-out lied to most people in real life about infertility. With others, I lied via omission. At best, I provided a few people with the partial truth. The people who were closest to us sometimes knew that we were doing treatments, but not the details, timing, nor outcomes. This is in stark contrast to blog readers, virtual strangers who have been kept up to date on the day-to-day details of treatments as well as my intimate emotions.

Of course, because this is an anonymous blog, there are certain details that I have left out, and I have disguised some details to preserve anonymity while keeping the same spirit.

During pregnancy, I’ve left a larger number of details out because I wanted to keep this an infertility blog rather than a pregnancy-after-infertility blog, but you’ve still been privy to far more of the details and emotions than real life friends and family.

But, some non-pregnancy/non-infertility issues have come up during the course of the pregnancy which have had a huge impact on my life. Some are in realms that I don’t discuss on this blog, such as work, but one major event in particular felt strange not to tell you about. It was one of the biggest events of my life, and I didn’t even hint at it.

Now, post-birth, I feel like I’m living dual lives. I will give readers of this blog a few photos and some basic information about the babies, as a thank you for following me through failed treatments, successful treatments, and pregnancy. But, you’ll never hear key details like the babies’ real names. My focus will continue to be on my own reproductive experience and infertility. As part of that, I’ll be giving you every detail of the birth story, which has major infertility implications. I’ll continue to view my life through the lens of infertility, and I’ll keep asking Thoughtful questions. Little will change on this blog — even though everything for me has changed.

As for the other half of my dual life: For people I know in real life, they are hearing every minute detail about the babies and receiving daily photos, but only a couple of close friends will get even the smallest hint at what I have gone through medically. We haven’t told family anything, and we don’t plan to.

Some of the silence about my experience concerns whose story it is to hear: our parents are entitled to know all about their grandchildren, but not about me. Some of the silence is about not dealing with people’s reactions. Some is leftover discretion from infertility.

And thus, there is no complete record. If you combine this blog with real life sources you get a pretty good sense, but there are only a couple of people in the world who get both versions.

Part of me feels funny for leaving you out of the loop with certain topics, and part of me knows that this is how it has to be.

For what it’s worth, even though it doesn’t come with as many cute pictures, I think you’re getting the more authentic version of me.

To what extent is your blog a complete and accurate record of your life?

Thoughtful Thursday: Lurkers

Happy October. No, really, I mean it.

Happy October! October Babies!!!!

Here are the Intelligentsia (people who have commented on every Thoughtful Thursday post for the month of September). September was a busy month for Thoughtful Thursday, and it was an extra-busy month for several members. There are quite a few mothers of multiples this time around, including some who gave birth in the past month. Given my own current status, it seems appropriate to point those out (but kudos to all, including parents of singletons achieved through any means as well as those without children). This says to me that people with all sorts of similar experiences gather together, and it also says that you can’t keep some people away from blogs no matter what.

Wiseguy from Woman Anyone? continues her remarkable streak with 9 Intelligentsia appearances.

Ernessa from Fierce and Nerdy and Kristen from Dragondreamer’s Lair are both back for the 7th time; in the middle of Ernessa’s June Intelligentsia participation she gave birth to her daughter.

Jill from All Aboard the Pity Boat and Photogrl from Not the Path I Chose return for the 5th time.

Making her fourth appearance is Cat, non-blogger but mother of triplets.

Jules from Just Multiply by 2 is a twin mom, and Lost In Translation from We Say IVF, They Say FIV is a singleton mom who first achieved Intelligentsia status at 41 weeks pregnant.

Heather from Joys In My Life took time out from her twins and singleton for Intelligentsia appearance #2.

There are lots of new members. Long-time commenter, first-time Intelligentsia member Lori, a.k.a. Lavender Luz, from Weebles Wobblog; twin mothers Elana from Elana’s Musings and Stacie from Heeeeere Storkey Storkey; Jamie from Sticky Feet and Michele from My Life After Loss, who both gave birth to twins this month while also achieving Intelligentsia Status, and Carrie from Tubeless in Seattle, expecting to deliver triplets sometime in October (the later the better!).

Now for this week’s Thoughtful Thursday topic. Skrambled recently had an interesting post about the reasons she writes her blog.

In my comment on her post, I wrote:

In addition to those, I’d say that I blog to connect to others with the benefit of a cohesive story and set of people. In earlier IF days I often read and considered message boards, but usually unless people are following a board closely, each post ultimately stands alone (plus the little signature at the bottom with all of the details of your cycles etc.).

One thing that really appealed to me about blogging is that you don’t have to retell your story over and over, that instead people follow along with you over an extended period (and I them). When I have read someone’s blog for a long time and feel like I know them as a person, their highs and lows are much more meaningful to me.

Sometimes this involves feedback/comments and sometimes none at all. Of course I love my regular commenters and I enjoy it when my lurkers show themselves, but I’m also happy to have lurkers who continue to lurk. Whether or not they’d get more out of the experience if they started participating in the conversation (which varies by person and is not for me to judge), if they’re getting something out of one-sided reading, mission accomplished.

This leads us now to another blogging-about-blogging topic, but one that we haven’t addressed on Thoughtful Thursday before: Lurkers.

As a blogger, how do you feel about lurkers? As a reader, when and why do you lurk? When and why do you delurk?

One feature that causes ALI blogs to accrue lurkers more than other types of blogs is the secrecy that often accompanies these topics. Many of us create pseudonyms with associated email addresses for our ALI life, but even so, people can find it difficult to comment on a blog and therefore out themselves (even if anonymously) as adopting, dealing with loss, or infertile — or some combination of those.

On the other hand, ALI blogging seems to engender more commenting than any other corner of the blogosphere that I’ve seen. Much of this is due to Mel’s efforts to encourage commenting through ICLW, LFCA, and the general atmosphere. Other types of blogs, even very widely read blogs, often receive few or no comments (except perhaps during National Delurking Week), but in the ALI blogosphere, the ratio of readers to commenters seems vastly higher than usual.

Which, therefore, means that the people who don’t comment can stand out in a way they wouldn’t for blogs on other topics.

To answer my own questions, as I said above, I am personally in favor of lurkers if that’s what they need to do. I also enjoy seeing them delurk when they think it’s time. Part of why I chose this topic now, aside from the related post on Skrambled, is that I have already experienced some delurking here recently, and expect to see more soon — perhaps when I have a birth announcement to make.

As a reader of others’ blogs, I am the opposite of a lurker. On many blogs I comment on just about every post, and on quite a few others others I comment on a fair number of posts. There are some blogs I follow where I comment less often, typically because the person is in a different place and I want to be sensitive to the fact that they may not want sympathy on a failed cycle from a pregnant woman (though if I’ve been commenting on the blog for a while, I often comment anyway). My commenting has gone down lately due to logistic constraints of horizontal typing during bedrest, but I don’t think there are any blogs that I read regularly (and there are a lot of them) where I’d consider myself a lurker. I do follow some as a Clicker for which I comment rarely but post news often, but that seems to be a different situation from regular blog reading.

And so, I can’t really answer the delurking question because I don’t lurk in the first place. I guess I used to lurk before I had a blog, but once I started my own, I tried to fully join the community, and I’ve never looked back.

As a blogger, how do you feel about lurkers? As a reader, when and why do you lurk? When and why do you delurk?

Pssst… hey, lurkers: now would be a perfectly fine time to delurk. Are you really going to lurk on a post about lurking? C’mon! Say hi!

Thoughtful Thursday: Patient

Infertility has tried my patience, and it has made me more patient, but that’s not the kind of patient I mean.

What kind of patient are you? How has infertility changed that?

In all realms of life, I straddle a line between following directions and thinking for myself. My rejection of directions is usually based on some combination of logic, my own research, my assessment of the validity of the directions, and doing what I feel like.

This certainly applies to health care. For example, after I had my wisdom teeth removed, I followed all of the instructions for cleaning the extraction sites, but I completely ignored the prescription for narcotics. After the day of surgery, I didn’t even take any Advil.

During infertility treatments, I almost always followed directions to the letter, except when I thought they didn’t matter. For instance, when I was told not to eat after midnight prior to IVF #2 retrieval, I bumped back the time on my own because my retrieval was scheduled for late morning. I know the purpose of being NPO, and I also know that the midnight instruction is the same whether the surgery is at 6 a.m. or 11 a.m. If six hours of fasting is enough for an early morning appointment, then it should be enough for a late morning appointment, in which case eating something at 4 a.m. is fine.

My most egregious case of ignoring doctor’s orders occurred during the infamous IUI #7, in which we didn’t bother to have sex in addition to the IUI because in my mind the whole cycle was pointless anyway. Result: currently 31w2d pregnant with twins.

As a pregnant woman, I have been amazingly dutiful. I have followed doctors’ and books’ recommendations as much as possible (as a vegetarian, 100 grams of protein requires a lot of work but is feasible, but 150 or 200 grams just doesn’t happen no matter how hard I try). When advice has conflicted, I’ve evaluated the relative merits and acted on what seemed to be the most prudent course of action.

And then my cervix started shortening and I was put on bedrest. I followed bedrest instructions to the letter (didn’t go anywhere outside the house except the doctor, didn’t sit up for more than 15 minutes at a time for meals, etc.).

And then I went into preterm labor and I was admitted to the hospital.

This whole time, doctors have remarked on what a “good bedrester” I was and continue to be. They tell me how some other patients interpret bedrest as cutting down on housework or being quicker about grocery shopping. When DH said to the head perinatologist that a high-activity day on bedrest for me meant that I went up the stairs once to go to the kitchen, she laughed.

They’ve been pleased, and a little bewildered, at my openness to staying in the hospital as long as they deem medically necessary. They talk about patients fighting to be discharged — particularly those with other children at home, or those whose husbands are incompetent/unwilling with housework. When I told DH about the latter, he got a little defensive and said, “You told them I’m not like that, right? That I’m not one of those husbands?” I certainly couldn’t manage total inactivity without his constant help.

Doctors and nurses have remarked on my cheerfulness, and one doctor makes fun of me for being so cheerful. They applaud my wisdom when I give them my stock explanation for my compliance and good attitude: Better here than in the NICU.

How did I get to the point of winning some sort of Best Patient award? Sure, I try to maintain perspective in everything I do. But in this case, I’m a model preterm labor patient because I dealt with seven years of infertility, and because I read infertility and loss blogs. It took a hell of a lot of time, money, and work to get this far. The stakes are clearly higher for me than they are for the patients down the hall that the nurses roll their eyes about, the ones who are still smoking (WTF?). Because of the heartache of my bloggy friends, I know that not all babies turn out fine, and I know that some babies die. Often there’s nothing that the woman or anyone else could have done — but if there’s anything I can do to help these babies make it into the world safely? You’d better believe I’ll do it.

What kind of patient are you? How has infertility changed that?

Thoughtful Thursday: Dibs

Continuing last week’s train of thought(fulness) on picking out baby names…

Many people talked about having names (or a set of candidates) while TTC or even before. A few people mentioned having a name selected but then, as the years passed, reconsidering after it became too popular. But none of the commenters mentioned another aspect of naming that I’ve heard infertiles talk about elsewhere: having the name stolen before you can use it.

Not infertility-related but still relevant… on Seinfeld, George chooses the name Seven in honor of Mickey Mantle’s number, long before thinking about actually having children. His fiancée mentions it to her pregnant cousin, who decides to use it on her unborn baby. George confronts the couple about the theft, and they counter that George and Susan aren’t pregnant and may never even get married. He has no exclusive right to the name.

Back to real life… by definition, infertiles take a long time to build their families. Adoptive parents also tend to have to wait many years. In the meantime, every time you blink, another fertile friend or relative has given birth. There are many opportunities for someone to steal a name out from under you. Some of them might be respectful of requests to hold off, but some like the cousins on Seinfeld might think that you have no right to a name if you aren’t even pregnant.

Has anyone stolen a name that you planned to use? Have you had concerns that a name might be stolen because of delays in your family-building?

One of my concerns about DH’s younger sister beating us in the baby race was having a name stolen out from under us (oh, and the fact that we were married almost a decade and TTC for half a decade before she even met her fiancé). The actual names would never be stolen — our selections are too unusual for that — but the names’ honorees could be. It is Jewish tradition to name babies in honor of a beloved deceased relative. Both of DH’s grandfathers died before we started TTC, one before I met DH and one between the time of our wedding and TTC. Before she died, I explicitly talked about naming a son in honor of the latter with DH’s grandmother.

A few months before she died, she and I had a quiet, intimate conversation. I asked her permission, if we ever had a son, to name the child after her late husband. She said, so gently, “I have thought about that, many times. That would make me very happy.” I cannot convey to you the warmth of her smile when she said that.

I don’t even know if the sister would name a baby in honor of anyone — she’s less into Judaism than DH despite their equally Orthodox upbringing, and her fiancé doesn’t do anything to encourage Jewish practice in their home the way that I have tried to do in ours. But if she did try to snipe a namesake… the naming rights are mine! All mine! We are older and we have been trying way longer and I got permission and her fiancé was around but refused to go to the grandmother’s funeral because he felt “uncomfortable” and he never even met the grandfather and WE HAVE DIBS!

Interestingly, DH’s sister is named verbatim for a deceased relative, whereas DH is not named for anyone. I don’t know if that factors into either of their decisions to name a baby after someone or not. During this pregnancy I offered her the name of the grandfather who died when they were kids, and she said “no thanks.” It could be that she doesn’t want to name a baby after anyone, or maybe she just doesn’t like that name.

As it stands, between the four names that my son and daughter will receive (not counting their Hebrew names), DH’s three deceased grandparents will each be honored. The fourth is just a name that I have always liked. There’s a good chance his sister will give birth in 2010, but whatever her naming intentions might have been, I have managed to sneak in just under the deadline, with both a boy and a girl. Take that! And, phew.

Has anyone stolen a name that you planned to use? Have you had concerns that a name might be stolen because of delays in your family-building?

This could also apply to objects like family heirlooms, birthrights, all sorts of things.

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?

Thoughtful Thursday: Worst

I have another post in my to-be-written Thoughtful Thursday queue that is perfect for this week’s events. But, emotionally I am not in a place to write that post today. We’ll try again next week.

Instead, I will address a topic that is easier for me but probably harder for you. If this is the easy topic for me, you must be asking yourself, what’s coming next week? First things first.

What was the worst day of your life?

This topic came to me Tuesday night, my first night in the hospital. As my husband, shockingly, got a full night’s sleep on the daybed, I tossed and turned and sobbed in my Kraftmatic adjustable labor putting-off-labor bed.

The worst day? What about that day, so many years ago, when a boyfriend tried to rape me? Naaah, that’s nothing compared to this.

Snapshots of Tuesday that make it a candidate for worst:

• Being told by MFM at weekly cervical check to drive immediately to the hospital but drop by the house and pack a bag first.
• I brought the book I happen to be in the middle of reading, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins. Every few sentences I’d have to put the book down and cry at the thought that I might not have twins, or any babies, to bring home. The Pottery Barn catalog that we grabbed from the mailbox when we went home to pack a bag did not lead to crying, but I couldn’t simultaneously hold it up and turn the pages because of the pain in my hand from my poorly-placed IV. (Fourth IV turned out to be the charm.)
• Alternating between thinking that the worst part would be losing these babies that I love so much, or that it would be worse to have to go back to fertility treatments after I thought I was done. I don’t know if that makes me a horrible person, or just a battered infertile.
• Not being able to be alone with my thoughts for more than 60 seconds without crying. Not at all like me, as most of you know.
• At the first hospital, dealing with the one midwife from my practice that I hate (out of 3 OBs and 6 midwives). She was the one on call two weeks ago at my non-stress test too. DH was out of the room whenever she was there during my first hospital visit, and he hadn’t accompanied to me to the routine appointment a couple of months ago when I met her the first time. At one point when she left the hospital room on Monday, I whispered to DH, “She’s the one I don’t like.” DH said, “I can tell.” I asked, “Because of how she is or because of my reaction to her?” DH said, “Both, but more because of her. Everyone else here is normal.” Another time I’ll tell you why I hate her so much. You will hate her too.
• Signing consent for emergency delivery in the ambulance.
• OB’s talk of delivery 3 to 4 weeks from now (31 to 32 weeks) as the unlikely best case scenario.
• When finally left alone with DH in the first hospital, crying, then pulling myself together halfway. When the lovely, cheerful nurse came to tell me that the ambulance would be ready soon, she asked me how I was doing. I did not give her a pat answer and instead just looked at her teary-eyed and speechless. Her cheerfulness turned to intense sympathy. I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at me quite like that before. I don’t know how I feel about being on the receiving end of a look like that.
• Ambulance ride was actually kind of fun at times, but needing to be in an ambulance was not. Even worse was that I actually stole it out from under another woman in Labor and Delivery who was supposed to be transported to another hospital, because I was much more urgent.
• Signing consent for emergency c-section, just in case.
• Meeting with anesthesiologist to talk about c-section options (she actually was quite pleasant, as almost everyone has been; both hospitals are full of outstanding bedside manner that makes me glad I don’t live in most of the places I used to live where people weren’t nearly so nice).
• Much talk about delivering imminently.
• Being told to expect a consult with a neonatologist and a NICU tour the next day.
• At both hospitals, being asked if I was “prepared” to bring the babies home, with cribs, car seats, etc. Standard labor and delivery question. No, I am not prepared — it is too early. I suggested to DH that we place the orders instead of waiting for people to buy them off our not-really-publicized-because-it-has-been-too-early registry. Then I reconsidered, not wanting to end up with two of everything when I might need only one. Or zero.
• Lying in bed, unable to shift to get remotely comfortable thanks to my catheter and IV, without any distraction but my almost-out-of-battery iPod. I tried to make myself sleepy with soothing songs, but every soothing song I could find made me burst into tears. Just like I can find infertility content in songs that have nothing to do with infertility, I can find Dead Baby and doom messages in anything, even songs that are supposed to hopeful. To top it off, blowing my nose after crying with every song hurt the catheter site terribly (eventually when I called the nurse to fix it, when I was in constant pain, we figured out why: it seems to have been jostled out of place just a bit, just enough to hurt, during the ambulance transport). Anyway, I didn’t want to listen to happy, upbeat songs that would make me un-sleepy. But, being alone in silence with my thoughts was worse. I tried a creative visualization, the first time I’ve ever tried that particular one, and it was good for 30 seconds at a time until my mind would wander to Dead Baby Thoughts. The only thing that eventually put me to sleep without crying, for a whopping one hour (after caving and agreeing to sleep medication!), was Radiohead. OK Computer is my go-to album when I’m upset. I should have just gone to it automatically at a time like this, but I don’t want it to take on bad connotations by bringing it out every time I am deeply upset. Let’s hope there aren’t too many times like this in the future.

Why the day loses the Worst prize:

• 24 hours later, my babies are still inside.

Instead, the Worst Day of My Life prize belongs to the day of my first miscarriage because that cloud did not end with a silver lining.

The current cloud has glimmers of silver so far, with potential for a complete lining or even full-blown silver through and through. Still a chance of rain, but I’m trying to keep looking out for the silver.

What was the worst day of your life? If it’s too awful to describe, I suppose you can just say that, but at least tell us whether there was any silver lining.