When All Is Said and Done

A couple of things have happened lately that made me reflect on some posts by Mel at Stirrup-Queens.  The first incident made me think of her What's In a Name post.  My Best Friend Back Home (BFBH) is pregnant with her third child.  They were "trying for a girl," a concept that makes my head spin.  She emailed me to talk baby names, a concept that honestly thrills me.  As someone who has spent way too much time thinking every month was "the one," and spends each day meeting new little ones at work with the most effed up names ever, I consider myself a name connoisseur.  It's one of the first gifts you give your child.  It's loaded with background, meaning, family history, personality, and love.  If you ask me, a name does help shape who we become.  BFBH has lovely choices in mind, but one would be the nickname of our girl name.  Yes, we are insane enough to have a girl name and a boy name chosen.  I'm not one who believes in "claiming" names, which is why BFBH doesn't know what our names are (that and she may think I'm a complete lunatic).  These names are important to us, but if BFBH wanted to give one to her daughter, I wouldn't dream of stopping her.  I wouldn't dream of not giving that name to our child either.  The reasons we chose our names are much different than the reasons she chose hers, whether they ended up being the same combination of letters or not.  It did make me think of something I hadn't before, though.  What if this doesn't work and I spend the rest of my life loving on BFBH's child who has the same name as our ghost child?  Will that make it harder to say goodbye to her?  Will be have a constant remembrance of what might have been? I suddenly feel like we made a huge boo boo here.  We used to look at names as a way of keeping hope alive, but I'm afraid that we may have delved into another situation where hope becomes an albatross rather than the perfect little dove it's supposed to be.

While we've been pretty good about keeping hope alive this cycle, we've also been reveling in the lasts.  Last night I injected my last FSH/LH cocktail ever.  I was thrilled.  I wasn't wistful or sad that that this is our last try.  I'm that ready to get off this train.  Looking at these lasts is a way of looking toward the future.  There is a bit of celebration in these lasts.  They are the lasts that could lead to a baby or not.  Either way, these lasts lead to a whole different life for J and me.  Each road deserves it own excitement and each road is a complete unknown to us.

So tonight I trigger for the last time.  On Tuesday, we go in for our last retrieval.  I'm going to stay away from the blogs until Beta.  I've been so good with the Circle + Bloom and doing my best to stay zen. I want to do everything I can to stay that way.  While I'm in a cycle, I get into this strange mindset where I see some giant stork in the sky handing out babies and if I see a load of BFPs in the blogosphere, I'm convinced that the stork will be passing us by once again because he forgot about us and ran out of pregnancies.  I don't want to have that neurotic feeling, so I'm going ostrich and sticking my head in the sand.  So, I'll see y'all in a couple of weeks.  Please forgive me for not commenting.  I promise I will catch up with your stories when all is said and done with us.