Letter To My Unnamed Daughter

Dear Daughter,

Four days ago I saw the first 3D images of your beautiful face. Your oldest sister stood by my side, mirroring the awe I felt at seeing you resting so peacefully against our placenta. I took a picture of the computer screen and emailed it to your father, knowing he'd want to see you. The picture wasn't very clear, but we could see your delicate features in a way we hadn't been able to see before.

Your father and I are having a tough time coming up with a name for you. Both of your older sisters have names that are found within our ancestry. Your oldest sister shares the name of her great-great-aunt from my side of the family and your other sister's name is the same as a 3rd great-aunt from your father's side.

I'd like to choose another family name; one that suits you. We have called you Dash for about 5 months now, but that's not a name we want to use as your legal name, even if we do continue to call you Dash for years to come. 

This may come as a surprise, but I didn't name your sisters and it looks like I won't be coming up with your legal name, either. Your father named our first daughter and she named her first little sister! I definitely agreed to the names, but they weren't my idea.

There are two names that your father and I are thinking about for you. One is the name of one of my grandmothers and the other is a name your father thought of while we were sitting at Burger King after an appointment a couple weeks ago. I'm not totally in love with either name, but I wasn't totally in love with the name of your oldest sister when it was decided, either.

Names are things that have to grow on me, and that's just how it is. If your father could agree to let me call you Talia, I'd be thrilled. I love my name and wish I could share it with one of my children, but let's face it, our last name makes things a little harder because we don't want rhyming names and I'm not a big fan of alliterations, either.

So for now, you are Dash. 

My Dash

My rainbow after years of storms

The answer to thousands of prayers

The reason I can't sleep at night

The reason I can't stop smiling during the day

My Dash

Last night we celebrated your father's birthday with a few of our local relatives. He feels old and a little lost, and I know some of his emotions are being compounded by the stress of  our lives this last year. We never thought we'd be in our mid-to-late thirties and still trying to have children, wrestling with a tight budget, and worrying about our heater breaking (yes, ours did that this morning). As you grow up, please be kind to his worrying heart. Remind us with your smile and your hugs that there are more important things in life than how old we feel, how small our house is, and what our yard looks like.

Like your big sisters, you are doomed to watching football for the next 18 years. But if you are lucky, you'll learn to love the sport like they have and we can sit as a family and spend our Friday nights or Saturday afternoons rooting for the underdogs, cheering after an exceptional pass, and getting angry at the refs when they make a ridiculous call or don't call something we think they should have!

You will also watch hours upon hours of science fiction, historical fiction, classics, and documentaries. Your life will be filled with more books than you can imagine, too!

You will spend hours standing near your father's new globe (his present this year!) as he shows you where things are, how the solar system functions, and the places he's lived. When you ask how far away something is, we'll walk to the globe and I'll show you.

You will discuss politics, science, and religion with all of us during trips to the grocery store. You'll learn add and subtract during walks around the pond.

You will know that we love our Heavenly Parents and that we try each day to parents like them. You will see me cry, sometimes because I'm excited or happy, but sometimes they will be tears of frustration or sadness, too.

You will know that before you were conceived, you had a brother who didn't live until his birth. You will hear your big sisters talk about him. His name was Jackson. They miss him. I miss him, too. Sometimes even now as I sit in church, a hymn will be sung that reminds me of him and I will cry and you will see that. Hug me when you see those tears.  Remind me that I wouldn't have you if I hadn't lost him. 

Ask me questions. Easy questions. Hard questions. Silly questions. I love to teach, but I don't always know where to start. Your questions will give me a starting point. If you don't ask when you are young, I may not know how to answer when you are older.

Trust me. I don't make promises I can't keep. No means no and Yes means yes. Maybe is a toss up, as it's intended to be. I am honest. If you ask me something I don't know, I will let you know that I'm not sure. If something is multi-sided, I'll share my views and ask that you think about them, but encourage you to form an opinion of your own and hope that you'll always be open to changing your opinion as you learn new things.

Learn from the mistakes of those around you and be gentle with them. All of our actions have consequences but some are more obvious or more painful than others.  Remember that everyone has been given the right to choose for themselves and sometimes the choices of others will hurt you. Don't let that hurt become hate. Instead, use those experiences to strengthen those around you.

Study the scriptures and the teachings of modern day prophets and apostles. Heavenly Father hasn't put a prophet on the earth now so that we ignore him. He is here to guide us today and what he teaches is more applicable than the prophets who have passed, even recently. 

Remember that all church leaders also have the right to choose. They have their own opinions, views, and reasons for doing and saying what they choose. They don't always agree and that is okay. We have been created in the image of our Heavenly Parents, but that doesn't mean we will all think the same. However, each of them, like your father and I, are doing their best to follow the teachings of our Savior so that we can live with him, and with each other, when the time comes.

You have been given an opportunity that many other children are not given. You have a father and mother who are sealed for eternity in a temple of God and who live in a nation filled with freedoms that most of the world cannot even comprehend. The technology that has developed in my life has been amazing and I can only begin to imagine the wonderful things you may see and experience as you grow.

Without modern medicine, you would never have been able to join our family. Someday, I will show you pictures of the bruises from the injections I had to give myself twice a day so that my body would give yours a chance to grow. Those medicines are our lifeline, yours and mine.  It is such a simple medication, but without it, you would never have had a chance.

Dash, you are loved more than words can express by your father, your sisters, and me. Don't ever doubt how much we care for you or how often we pray for you. You aren't just our daughter, you are a daughter of God and that will give you more power and strength than anything we could teach you.

We'll try to teach you everything we know so that you can know all the things we've learned. 

But first, let's see if we can find a name for you . . .

Friendship . . . Or the Post I Have No Idea What to Title

For the last couple of months, this feeling has been stuck in the pit of my stomach and I haven't been able to figure it out.

After conversing briefly with an online friend, I finally realized what it was.

So on top of the anxiety and the fear and the hormones, I realized today that I'm lonely. I hope that if I can number the ways I'm lonely, I can also find a way to reverse some of the causes.

1. Most of the women in my infertility groups have at most one living child. I have 2. And any time I mention either of them, I feel guilty that I've not been content with having the 2 that I have.  That I've lost 5 other babies and been on this rollercoaster for over 11 years doesn't seem to weigh as significantly as the knowledge that I have two perfectly healthy daughters to these women. It comes out in the wording of their comments and I'm not so blind or out of touch as to not pick up on their subtleties.

2. I'm afraid to talk to my husband about the baby. It feels like he has done everything he can to distance himself from this pregnancy to protect himself. I understand his need to distance himself after what he also went through with our son, but it has left me feeling an overwhelming burden to leave him alone when I'd rather sit in his arms and cry or let him feel the joy I have in those moments where Dash is letting me know with every possible movement that she's there, she's alive, and she doesn't plan to go anywhere anytime soon.

3. The women who were pregnant with me and didn't meet a similar tragic end all get to hold their babies each night. They're posting picture after picture of their beautiful and growing bundles of joy and I see them and think about the moments I had to hold my son while being horrendously afraid that I won't get to hold a healthy little girl in the coming months. I have no such pictures to share and that hurts.

4. The new "crop" of pregnant women in one of the groups I'm in seems to have a different child-rearing and prenatal care philosophy than I and the group of "pregnant-together with Jackson" seem to have shared. Each time I try to offer my thoughts, I feel attacked. It's sort of like "I spent years trying to get pregnant and now I'm going to take what I feel is the easy way out so keep your 8+ years of motherhood and 11+ years of health research out of my way. I don't want to listen to it."

5. Let's face it: the number of close friends I have that live locally is Zero. This isn't exactly new to me--all of my closest friendships (apart from my husband and our best man) have been long distance. Even as a child I wasn't the kind to keep a friend very close on an emotional level. It's just not my style. Or it was, but I got burned pretty badly one too many times and learned that distance was less painful. The hard part is that sometimes I really do want that friend, the one who can read between the lines and come knocking on my door to take me out to lunch, or give me a hug, or go for a walk around the lake. But there isn't one within a 1,000 mile radius.

6. Here's the big one: I miss my mother. Horribly. Painfully. Daily. And I miss my dad, too. I realized last night that I hadn't heard from him in 6 weeks. I have no idea why. In the last couple of years he's become very distant. He doesn't always answer text messages, rarely returns phone calls, and never emails unless it's something very "businessy".  After over a year of feeling like an afterthought, I've come to the realization that I'm not that important to him and neither are my children. It hurts. I don't know how much of his distance is related to the loss of my mother and how much is his balancing his newish marriage and trying to get to know his stepkids.  But I do know that I'm tired of trying to find parental support on those rare occasions when I feel I need it and finding that I don't matter enough for a returned phone call.

So yes, I'm lonely. I have tried seeking help from a therapist on several occasions but find that nobody wants to take insurance anymore and someone who understands the framework of my religious beliefs as well as that of pregnancy loss is impossible. My budget isn't so loosey goosey that I can fly to Utah, where such therapists actually exist.

And I'm not allowed to fly, anyway.

What to do . . . what to do . . .

1. Recognize that my hormones sometimes get totally out of control. Today is one of those days, but at least it helped me to pinpoint an emotion I hadn't been able to pin over the last few months.

2. Leave the mommy-to-be group. I deleted the majority of my comments and posts and left the group. There's a decent chance I won't be missed (like I said, the current crop has very different feelings about things than the group I joined with last year!) and I'm totally okay with that.

3. I can't bring my mother back, but I can wait patiently for my mother-in-law to retire (less than 2 years!) so that I don't feel like I'm bugging her in the meantime when I feel the need for mature support. She's not Mom, but she's absolutely wonderful and I'm so very lucky to have her in my life.

4. I'm not sure what to do about my husband. He values his emotional independence just as much I do and has been that way for as long as I've known him, and based on family stories, has been that way his whole life. He has a lot of things on his plate besides just worries about Dash, and I respect that. But I think he and I also need to sit down at some point and start talking and planning for the months ahead. For one, Dash needs a real name and I'd prefer she have one picked out before she's born. I just need to find the emotional and physical strength to get the conversation started.

5. Everyone experiences loneliness at some point in their lives. Just because I feel alone doesn't mean that I am. I still have my Heavenly Father and even if he's all I've got, he's the best to have.

Saturday was a bit of a lazy morning and I didn't shower until about noon. When I stepped into the shower, I had every intention of spending the rest of my day watching Once Upon a Time. By the time I was grabbing my towel, I knew I was going to the temple instead. My husband took a look at my dress when I went down to the basement and knew exactly where I was headed, knowing it was clearly something I needed to do.

While there, I intended to spend my time and thoughts focusing on strength for me, something that is fairly normal for Latter-day Saints to do at the temple.  Instead, my thoughts kept turning back to another mother in my ward. Her trials make mine look like a cake-walk. So instead of praying for myself and my baby girl, I prayed for Ann.

My loneliness may take time to heal, and it will likely take some significant effort on my part, but at least now I know what I have to deal with, and that's always half the battle.

On a side note, it is totally possible that some of what I'm experiencing is postpartum depression . . .