Part of the pain associated with losing a baby includes not
getting to use his or her name. For many parents once a name is selected, a
baby becomes more permanent in the mind’s eye. A name allows parents to begin
to picture themselves yelling, “Matilda Plum stop climbing on the couch!” or
imagining family and friends’ squeals of approval when finally hearing the
secret name “Milo Juniper” after the baby is born. Perhaps most importantly,
naming a baby is one of the very first parenting acts that shapes who a child
will be for the rest of her or his life.
On January 12th, 2015 we welcomed our son who we
named Fyodor Rain. We chose the middle name Rain for a couple of reasons. As I
wrote in a previous post, a rainbow baby is one who comes after the loss of
another child—a glimmer of hope in the face of a dark storm. The name Rainbow
was out of the question, but Rain seemed a perfect reminder that there has been
such beauty in our darkest of days and the losses of all of our babies. Additionally,
as Matilda and Milo’s middle names are both trees, we wanted this new baby to have
a tree name too. The Rain Tree or the Albizia
Saman is a gorgeous tree whose leaves fold in during night and rainy
weather—a reminder to hold one another tight when things get dim.
The name Fyodor first came to us about five years ago. We
were hoping to get to use it for one of our three embryos resulting from our
second IVF cycle. When we lost Baby Willer after that cycle, we held on to the
hope that someday our Fyo would come to us. Because we thought Milo was a girl
our entire third pregnancy (and Milo was one of our girl names), we did not
plan to use Fyodor. When we found out Milo was a boy, we discussed whether we
should switch his name. However, he had been Milo throughout almost the entire
pregnancy, and so it just didn’t seem right to give him someone else’s name. I
promised Mark that if we ever had another baby and he was a boy, we would name
him Fyodor.
Fyodor is a Russian name meaning “God’s gift.” We pronounce
it “fee-ah-door,” like the American name Theodore. We call our sweet little guy
Fyo ("fee-oh") for short. The name is a nod to the Russian novelist Fyodor
Dostoyevsky whose most famous books include Crime
and Punishment and The Brothers
Karamazov. Our admiration for him springs from a chapter in Philip Yancey’s
book Soul Survivor.1 Yancy
details the life of Dostoyevsky in comparison to another 18th
century Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace and Resurrection.
Yancy uses the lives of the authors to illustrate the depths of grace, forgiveness,
compassion, and love.
Both men longed to please God; however, their paths were
very different. Tolstoy’s philosophy was that the way toward God was to live
perfectly according to the laws of the bible. However, he advocated a life of chastity
but his wife had 16 pregnancies; he vowed to give up meat and his servants, but
never actually did so; he helped others but never offered to give his wife a
break from her laboring. No one was more critical of this failure to live up to
his own and the perceived ideals of God than Tolstoy himself.
Dostoyevsky was not a perfect man either, implicated in such
immoralities such as gambling, infidelity, and alcohol abuse. He was accused of
treason and sentenced to death. At the last minute, the tsar pardoned Dostoyevsky
and sentenced him to four years of hard labor. He then spent six years in exile.
As a result of his pardoning and an unexpected second chance at life, Dostoyevsky
committed himself fully to God. Despite dreadful conditions, during his time in
prison he went through what Yancy calls a virtual resurrection. He was able to
glimpse Christ even in the most vile and hateful prisoners and in those who
extended him kindness while he was there. He came to believe that it is only
through being loved that one is capable of it. It is this grace that
Dostoyevsky conveyed in his greatest works of literature.
Yancy uses the stories of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to
illustrate how he came to understand how we, as terribly imperfect beings, can
possibly live according to the bible’s seemingly unobtainable ideals. Yancy
writes: “There is only one way for us to resolve the tension between the high
ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will
never measure up, but that we do not have to. Tolstoy got it halfway right:
anything that makes me feel comfort with God’s moral standard, anything that makes
me feel, ‘At least I have arrived,’ is a cruel deception. Dostoyevsky got the
other half right: anything that makes me feel discomfort with God’s forgiving
love is also a cruel deception….God loves us not because of who we are and what
we have done, but because of who God is. Grace flows to all who accept it.”
As self-acknowledged perfectionists, these words and the
novelists’ stories are so very meaningful to Mark and me. My desire to be good
and do good have been functional for me; I have enjoyed much success. However,
such pressure at times has been debilitating. I’ve laid awake uncountable
nights fearing how I will ever meet a deadline or about how I’ve let someone
down. Like many people who can’t get pregnant or have lost babies, I have constantly
questioned what it was that I did that made me a worthy recipient of so much
pain. My feelings about my imperfect body and its failings are very
well-documented in this blog. But at the time I read Yancy’s chapter and even
today, I am reminded that I am not perfect and I don’t have to be. My pain
isn’t the result of my misdeeds or my inability to measure up. As I get some
distance from my most painful of days, I get better at choosing to accept grace.
There is no doubt that our son we be imperfect. He will make
bad decisions, at times disappoint us, and likely will be heartbreakingly hard
on himself. As he gets older, we hope that our sweet Fyo doesn’t hate us for
choosing such an unconventional name. People will inevitably mispronounce it
and mistakenly think he said “Theodore” instead of “Fyodor” when he tells them
his name. Others will avoid saying it all together out of fear of getting it
wrong. When he fails and when these things happen, hopefully he is reminded of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and that he and others are not perfect, nor should they
be. In so doing, our hope is that he learns the meaning of grace.
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| Copyright Katherine Payne Photography |
