spiritbaby names

I haven't told anyone this yet, but I've been feeling a little odd about the name we gave our baby. If she had lived, she wouldn't have been called Angel Mae. Mae was one of the names we were kicking around. Also June, Iris, Evangeline, Lucinda, and Talitha. The last name we had landed on was Naomi, with "Mimi" for short (Brian's super cute idea).

But Angel Mae was a name given to Brian from the stars, I think. After the nurses had put her into my arms and left us alone with her, he came out with, "How about Angel Mae?" I nodded through my tears. I knew that naming her was his heart touching hers, and one of the few acts of fatherhood he would be allowed. (Others have included picking up her ashes from the funeral home and chasing down hospital staff to locate her autopsy report. My poor, dear man...)

A lot of babyloss parents lose their babies much later in their pregnancies or after birth. They already had "real" names picked out. They know what they would have called this new little person in their family - the name they would have written on birthday cards or hollered up the stairs at dinner time. If Angel Mae had lived, we'd have been hollering some other name. When I imagine our family life together with this little girl, Angel Mae is not her name. So I've been feeling odd - there is Angel Mae who we lost, and the future Angel Mae who we will never know who would have had a different name.

But last night I got it sorted out in the shower. Angel Mae is her spiritbaby name. In many cultures people get two names. Sometimes one name as a child and another as an adult. One name in secular life and another in religious life. In some cultures children receive a "secret" name at maturity, the true name of their spirit. In the West we usually don't make the distinction between the name of our eternal soul and the name of our body/personality that is walking around in the concrete world. (Although maybe Catholic confirmation names are something to do with this?) But it is done, meaningfully and often, in other times and places.

So I am mama to a spiritbaby named Angel Mae. Who she would have been, what we would have called her, what our future would have been like if she had lived... We will never know. I can only love her as she is, my dear little baby, my strawberry girl, my Angel Mae.