Octuplets

I had a nightmare last night. I was the mother of octuplets. I was on a gurney, waiting for anesthesia so that they could be delivered. I’ve had two caesarians in real life, so it was sort of familiar to me. But in my nightmare the scary part started when I was faced with eight pairs of pathetic eyes, looking at me with questions I couldn’t answer, still on my abdomen.

I’ve been creepily fascinated with the story of the woman who delivered octuplets a few weeks ago. I just can’t believe it. I’m entranced by the conversations her situation has engendered. How broad a right is the right to reproduction? Who is to say when it’s out of control? Do we really leave it up to the good sense of a doctor being paid for a procedure to determine if a woman should have more children? There is no clear answer to me but I think it’s a healthy discussion in which politics and religion play a role but make it hard to predict how someone will come out. Because I don’t know what I think myself.

I think two different news stories melded in my mind to produce my nightmare. I was told a few days ago that the doctor responsible for implantation of the octuplets also implanted a woman in her fifties who is expecting quadruplets. So, with my two children well through their teens, I tossed and turned in the middle of the night at the idea of taking care of eight infants.

In my dream, I knew that this had been an accident – that I ended up with eight fetuses through some natural malfunction of my confused remaining estrogen supply. So I was blameless.

My first concern in the dream was where I would find room for eight cribs, multiple changing tables, space to put so many diapers. This was resolved by realizing there would be sufficient room in the sunny living room in my girlhood home. Strange, but it made me relaxed.

Then I went on to the much more perplexing task. What would I name them?

With my own real-life children I greatly enjoyed figuring out what they should be called. I had a firm idea that they needed to be named after people I admired and respected, people in the family if possible, with a balance between my family and that of my husband. The two names came to me fairly easily. First, James Eric, named for both my grandfather Seamus, the one who got organized enough to leave Ireland, and James, his son and my uncle. Eric is for my husband’s brother, a quiet renaissance man I greatly respect. Then, William Anthony, named for both my brother and William Brennan, one of my favorite Supreme Court justices (although a friend evilly pointed out he could just as easily be named for William Rehnquist who was the Chief Judge of the Supreme Court at the time of Will’s birth), and then for my husband’s grandfather, who shared my son’s birthday. I felt satisfied and quite happy at coming up with these name combinations, and it didn’t even bother me that I had selected names of English kings for these children with strong Irish Republican blood ties.

I have even taken great care in naming pets through my life – with Cicero, Lena, Damien, Lick, Jack, George and Louie all having appropriate names that lasted them well through their time with me.

So it’s not surprising that the name selection for the octuplets stumped me. I swam in and out of sleep as thematic combinations tumbled through my mind.

John, Paul, George and Ringo. But what about the girls? I couldn’t remember the names of any female early sixties rockers other than Ronnie Spector. I moved on.

Santo, Fredo, Connie, Michael. No that wouldn’t work.

Elizabeth, Jane, Lydia, Emma. So far so good. But the men’s names faded away. I couldn’t imagine having a son named Mr. Darcy.

Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth, James – the Tudors were promising but again, I couldn’t imagine having a little girl named for Bloody Mary.

My mind jumped forward in time. Caddie, Quentin …. no, no, Faulkner is too depressing to live everyday.

Didn’t Theodore Roosevelt have eight children? Wasn’t one of them named Quentin? And Alice? But I couldn’t remember the others.

Maybe the Kennedys – Joe, Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Kathleen, Patricia, Rosemary, Eunice. No – too unlucky, too weird. And I have no political aspirations for my children.

Maybe more new age, a selection of nouns, maybe the colors of paints used during the Renaissance – Sienna, Ochre, Ercolano, Azure. Possibly if I could think of eight.

I woke up, sweaty and disturbed. As I realized what I’d been dreaming about I turned over in disgust, profoundly disappointed in my inability to come up with a chain of more than three or four names that I found acceptable – failing even this minor aspect of a fictional exercise.