Names for Girls

I've said it before: Everyone I know is having babies. Seriously. It suddenly seems like every girl I know is in some stage of motherhood, and they're either thinking about names, narrowing down names, or settling on names as we speak.

Because of this, I've gotten a little swept up. I've thought about all the lovely things you could name a girl so that she has a song--because we all know how much I crave having a good song for my name--so that, someday, somewhere, a boy (or a girl--hey, whatever) will write those lyrics in some sweet note that'll get passed to the beloved during study hall.

Here are some of the songs that are on my list, if ever I decide I want to have children (and then get a girl):

"Caroline" by Old Crow Medicine Show

"You were born in St. Clair's Hospital, but I say you were born up in the sky..." Oh, hello. Tell me you wouldn't like those lyrics in a song about you.

"Helen" by Nizlopi

I've loved this song for a long time, but I like it even more now that I'm dating The Lady-Killer. Part of the song--"You sent me singing through the woods last night. You sent me singing. I'm a happy, singing boy because of you"--reminds me of him, about the first night we kissed. I went to see him at work. I did not go thinking I would kiss him, but, well, what can I say? There was a little bit of a moment, and we kissed. He had to go back inside almost immediately--his break was up--so we said goodbye, and while I was buckling my belt, he made his way around to the front of my car, put his hands on my hood to get my attention, and then he pointed back up to his face--which was smiling--with both index fingers.

"Grin!" he said.

I think the Nizlopi song captures a moment like that pretty well. (Good for you, Helen. Good for you.)

"Jolene" by Ray Lamontagne

I couldn't love this lyric any more than I do: "A man needs something he can hold on to: A nine pound hammer or a girl like you."

"Hannah" by Ray Lamontagne

Speaking of Ray Lamontagne, here's another good, good song. "All my wounds turned to gold when I kissed your hair..." Oh yes.

"Jolene" by Cory Branan

Dude, Jolenes have all the luck! Do you know how many songs about Jolenes there are? I especially like this one--probably because I like everything Cory Branan does. Do you hear his voice? Doesn't that voice sound like it belongs to a man you'd like to drink several thousand beers with?

"Kathleen" by Josh Ritter

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this song. In fact, I talk about this song all the time. I make everyone listen to this song, and then I talk about how much I love it, and then I give lectures on my favorite lyrics (1. The first line; 2. This part: "I know you are waiting, and I know that it is not for me. But I'm here, and I'm ready, and I've saved you the passenger seat. And I won't be your last dance, just your last goodnight. Every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied...").

Other people have even gotten in on the supporting of my "Kathleen" habit: This is my ringtone on Christine's phone.

This disturbs TLK a little bit, as his mother's name is Kathleen, but that didn't stop him from trying to quote this song to me one night. He looked over at me, pushed hair back from my face, and said, "You're the North Star." It was close. The lyric he was going for was this: "All the girls here are stars; you are the Northern Lights." But I didn't mind the change. I didn't mind being compared to the star that guides people home, takes people to exactly where they need to be.

"Goodnight Rose" by Ryan Adams

I could write an entire thesis on how much I love Ryan Adams, how he got me through all kinds of ugly stuff with the Wily Republican during grad school, but this song came later, after all of that, when I was already living in Maine. There's just something so hopeful about it.

~~~

I've got more, of course--tons!--but that's a start. Each of those songs makes me a little jealous but a little encouraged, too--like maybe someday one of those guys will meet and fall in love with a girl named Jessica and just like that, I'll finally have a song.

On the Occasion of Everyone I Know Being Knocked Up

Holy shit. Everyone I know is pregnant.

This all started in October, when Katy and Matt showed up in Maine.

"So," Katy said, "if we drive by a drug store, we should probably stop in."

"What do you need?" I asked. I am a girl with plenty of sundries, and if she needed anything--deodorant, lotion, tampons, laxatives--I would be able to accommodate those needs without having to pop over to a CVS.

But Katy just grinned. "Well," she said, "I took a pregnancy test last night, and it was positive, so I think I should take another one to get a second opinion."

And then I squealed. I squealed a lot. And then, after we ate a lobster lunch on the rocks of Cape Elizabeth, we drove straight to the drugstore and wandered up the family planning aisle.

Katy couldn't help herself. She stared at the prices--pregnancy tests aren't cheap--and then she reached for the cheapest one on the shelf.

"NO!" Matt and I said, in unison.

Her hand froze in midair. "What?" she said. "Seriously, what's wrong with a cheap pregnancy test?"

"You get what you pay for," I said. I was remembering last October, when I visited Minnesota and Diana threw a party after the Good Thunder reading, and we made Babies-in-the-Cupcakes, and whoever found a baby in his or her cupcake got a present from the grab bag. We'd combed the aisles of the local dollar store for an hour, just looking for good gifts to hand out later. We'd selected some boas, some statues, some tubes of dollar store lube, and, of course, a pregnancy test. One of the boys was lucky enough to choose the pregnancy test, and he strode upstairs with a beer in one hand and the test in another. He did his business while we all gathered outside to talk him through the process, and then he came out of the bathroom beaming. It was good news: He was with child.

So, a year later, standing in the family planning aisle of the Cape Elizabeth CVS with Katy, I felt compelled to remind her of that. "Will we really feel confident about the result from a cheap test?" I asked.

Katy frowned.

"Don't be cheap," Matt said.

Katy frowned even more, but she edged her hand higher, toward the more expensive brands. "Can I at least get this brand?" she asked, poking to a store brand box. "It's a two-pack! It's a deal!"

Matt and I sighed. She plucked the box from the shelf and went off to pay.

A few hours later, there were a tense few moments in my bathroom before Katy came out waving a stick in the air. "Look!" she said. Oh, and we sure did:



And then we celebrated:



Yes, I put the stick Katy peed on very close to my face. In my defense, the gross end was capped.

Matt and I were excited by the results. I think it will please Katy that I've put a very rare picture of me in sweat pants out here for the world to see.



I can't remember what Katy is drinking here. It might be Loganberry. I might've been so pleased that I mixed her a big glass of Loganberry because, well, she earned it.

Not long after Katy and Matt left Maine for Mankato, I got more news. This time I was in my car, and I was driving the two hours down to Boston to pick Josh up from the airport after he ditched France. I had just crossed over into New Hampshire when Rachel, another of my best grad school girls, was having a baby, too. The kicker? She was due only three weeks before Katy. The two of them were going to be having babies at pretty much the exact same time.

At first I felt a stab of jealousy because my brain went fast-forwarding through the next few months, and I could see them pushing their stomachs together and posing for pictures, shopping for cute maternity clothes, comparing aches and pains, secretly swapping name ideas. And then, as quickly as it came, the jealousy disappeared and was replaced by another feeling, and that feeling has been simmering for a while now.

It's hard being away from my old friends. They're spread out from Buffalo to California. They're everywhere in between. They're nowhere near me. And it seems so odd that I was there for their weddings, for their first big steps into adulthood, but now I won't be there for the next. It seems completely bizarre to me that they will be pregnant all that time, and I will not see them. I'll never get to put my hand on their swollen stomachs and wait patiently to feel a kick. The night I first realized that, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I wanted to pack a bag and fly to Minnesota right then, right that second, but I couldn't, and I didn't, and instead I am trying to find comfort in the fact that, yes, this summer I'm driving out, and I'm going to spend time with the new babies in the Midwest, and, yes, Katy is forcing me to change my very first diaper then, and, yes, I will do my part in spoiling the new babies, and that's all great and wonderful and lovely, but it still seems just so quick, like those girls are going to snap their fingers and then, before you know it, before you can even orient yourself, everything is different, and I wasn't even there to see the change.

Damn You, Make Me Babies.Com!

So, the other day I was on Facebook, and over in my news feed an odd little picture popped up, and what it was was this: it was a picture of a baby that had been generated when my friend's picture had been combined with another friend's picture.

As soon as I saw that, I knew I had to have my own composite baby. Which meant I followed the link on that picture to the website that made it. Which meant I spent a good chunk of time uploading pictures of all the guys I know so I could plug those pictures in with mine.

In my defense, this was in the name of science. I wanted to know which of my friends (or exes or imaginary lovers) would produce the best looking child. Here are some of the results:

Reaction:Fair enough. I was wrong. If Ryan Miller and I do ever manage to fall in love--which we so should--our offspring wouldn't look as hideously long-faced as previously thought. I think I'd finally be able to tell Keith to suck it; after all, he was the person who said that if Ryan Miller and I ever had a baby, it would come out looking like the Scream mask.

Reaction: Sad. You can totally tell this girl is going to grow up to have a uni-brow. My genes and Ryan's genes should just never meet.

Reaction: Apparently New Boy and I (remember him? Oh, who could forget?) would have very rosy-cheeked babies. Rosy-cheeked babies that look like they might grow up to become Jonathan Tucker. I'm not against that.)

Reaction: Hey, look at that. If I'd ever had a baby with the Boy From Work, she would've been cute. And a fan of daisies, apparently.

Reaction: I have the feeling that Josh would never allow one of his children to dress up as a duck. I'm fairly certain that when Josh does have kids, he'll dress them up for Halloween as members of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Reaction: See that baby right there? That baby's got the look of a very precocious literary superstar. That's what happens when you combine the genes of a fiction writer and a poet.

Reaction: This one freaks me out. It is eerie in its accuracy. If someone else had combined these pictures and then shown me the result without telling me who the parents were, I'd be able to take one look at that and say, "Holy God, that's the Wily Republican's baby, isn't it? That's what the baby would look like if he and I had had kids?" That kid looks so much like him it's ridiculous.

Reaction: I saved the best (funniest? most disturbing?) for last. Keith and I? Yeah, Keith and I would've had fat, fat babies.

Add Her to the List

I'm not the only one who's been noticing I'm creeping closer and closer to the time in my life where I'm supposed to be progressing on to the next stage. My gynecologist has noticed, too.

I had my annual appointment on Wednesday, so I went, showed up early, filled out the required paperwork, worked up a urine sample--you know, everything you are supposed to do. And after the preliminary work was done, I answered the questions the nurse asked.

Any STDs? No. Any abnormal paps? No. Drink any caffeine? No. Tea? No. Any wicked addictions to crystal meth? No.

Satisfied, the nurse left me alone. She promised my doctor would be in shortly, and she didn't lie. My gynecologist--a lovely woman I lucked into when I was searching for a good doctor after I moved--came through the door looking just the way she had the year before: sweet and bursting with information. She looked a little like my grandmother who died when I was in grad school, and when I realized that--somehow I hadn't realized it the year before--I almost cried as she and I chit-chatted.

But then came this, which snapped me out of thinking about my grandmother and how possibly she had died missing me because I hadn't been speaking to my grandfather and thus avoiding their house for six months.

My gynecologist nodded at my file. "Wow," she said. "Aren't you a good patient? You don't even drink coffee."

"I'm a little boring, I think," I said.

"Honey," she said, smiling sweetly, "around here, boring is good. This is good. This is great." Then she pushed back from her computer and looked me straight in the eye. "So, last year we were talking about maybe getting you an IUD. Did you decide you wanted one?"

"Oh no," I said. "I think I'll just stick with what I've got. I'm doing good."

She nodded. "So, are you going to be having a baby this year?" she asked.

I hadn't been prepared for that question, and I almost swallowed my tongue. "Uhm," I said. "Uhm, no. No! No baby this year!" I tried to come off upbeat and peppy. I sounded like a cheerleader trying to make up for having the wrong answer in math class.

"Really?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Really."

She pursed her lips. "And do you ever want to have a baby?"

My hands were suddenly clammy. I didn't understand where this particular line of questioning was going. I also didn't understand where it had come from. We had just been talking about how I was set with my birth control, how I didn't want to make any changes, how I was good.

"Well, I don't know," I said, but then I jumped to make a correction. "I mean, I think I do," I said. "I'm pretty sure. Just in the future. You know, not now. Some day."

I just didn't want to disappoint her. It looked like she was so surprised and even a little sad when I said I don't know. It looked like she was thinking, She doesn't know? She better figure it out soon.

I don't know why she seemed so surprised. Maybe there was a note in my file about being in a long-term monogamous relationship--because I was last summer--and maybe she'd written that down as justification for the types of birth control options we were discussing. Maybe she thought my boyfriend and I were just offbeat, a little different, the type who were going to live together for the rest of their lives and not bite the bullet and get married. Maybe she thought we were the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell of Maine.

"I see," she said. "You're sure?"

"Pretty sure," I said. I wanted to add that it would probably be a good idea to have a man before I considered getting pregnant, but I didn't want to get into that whole business, so I just shut up and nodded when she told me she was going to step outside for a moment and wait while I changed into my gown and hoisted myself up on the table.

I did as I was told. I put my head, my arms, my feet where she wanted them. And the rest of the exam went on as normal, until--in the middle of everything--my gynecologist stopped what she was doing and said, "I'm just going to say this one thing, okay? If, if, if you decide to try to get pregnant this year, I want you to start taking a multi-vitamin with folic acid in it about three months before you start trying."

My feet were in the air, my head was on a deflated pillow that dozens of women had rested on already that day, and I was staring at the ceiling. One of the panels had been excavated from the normal tile pattern and in its place the hospital had seen fit to install a fake stained glass insert--one which featured a garden scene and several playful hummingbirds. I wanted to reach up and see how close I could come to touching the artist's depiction of so many whirring wings. Or maybe I wanted to reach up and see how easy it would be to punch through that insert, create an escape for myself. Maybe I was wondering who the hell would decide hummingbirds were what women wanted to look at when they had a doctor murmuring the words, And now you'll feel a little pressure to them as their exam began.

I didn't know what to do or say. I could have probably just told my doctor I didn't have a boyfriend at the moment, and I really would like to be married before I thought about having children, so it seemed likely I would not be making choices about multi-vitamins with folic acid in them in the coming months. And I don't know why I didn't tell her that. It would have been easy, and it would have stopped the discussion. But I was tired, so I took a breath and settled the cheerleader chirp back into my voice.

"That's fascinating information!" I said. "That's good to know! I'll remember that!"