Which required, of course, deciding she was our daughter. And not our son. We still don't have the endocrine data back, but the doctor's tell us it's unlikely to be very revelatory, in any event. But our little one, assuming she makes it out of the NICU, has many years of surgery in her future. Gender reassignment surgery seemed like a major and un-necessary medical procedure to subject our baby to.
Thus we went the path of least resistance - the outwards appearance of her anatomy. Thus, a little girl. Which was how all the NICU nurses were referring to her, anyhow - they are, of course, the ones changing her diapers!
It is definitely nice to refer to our baby as "her" instead of "it" or "the baby".
Will she require hormone treatment sometime down the road to help maintain a feminine identity? Maybe. That seems very far away in another universe. Right now, it just seems like the right way to go.
Because Harper turned our world upside down, we turned our list of names upside down, too. Because of the uniqueness of the situation, we wanted a more gender neutral name. Harper, which is a name I have loved for a long time, was something we'd strongly been considering as a middle name for a girl.
Marek is a male name that we had been considering for a boy. But it was important to us that the middle name of this baby honor Lou's grandparents. So we changed it to Merrick, which is the town on Long Island where they are from. It seemed to go perfectly with Harper and was again somewhat gender neutral. I actually had a female penpal named Marrick throughout high school.
Harper Merrick. It wasn't a name we'd planned, just as the circumstances were not as we planned. But it is a name that I love. Just as I am learning to love the little girl we've given it to.
Beautiful name!
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