I named the embryo “The Maybe.” Not out loud, not to my wife, not in the clinic portal where the embryologist had already assigned it a number and a letter grade like a cut of beef. I named it in a private journal I started the week of the transfer, a journal I told myself was for “processing” but was really for control. The Maybe. It was the best I could do. It was honest in a way that “Baby” wasn’t, that “Little One” felt like a lie, that “Embryo 4AB” was accurate but also the language of a lab report, not a hope. I wanted a name that held the uncertainty without collapsing into it. I wanted a title for this chapter of my life that didn’t pretend to know the ending.
What I discovered, over the weeks that followed, is that we have almost no good language for the things we build when the thing we’re building is a family. The tools we do have—the clinic’s numbering systems, the insurance company’s “infertility diagnosis” codes, the culture’s insistence on “natural” versus “artificial,” the well-meaning friend’s “when are you due?”—are all titles someone else wrote. They are the equivalent of a book title generator spitting out options based on genre and market positioning, calibrated for broad appeal, optimized for clarity, and completely indifferent to the actual story.
I know this because I spent an evening, somewhere around day six of the two-week wait, actually using a book title generator. I typed “queer woman tries to get pregnant through reciprocal IVF while insurance denies everything and her mother keeps asking about the real father” into a prompt field and watched the algorithm return suggestions like “Between Two Worlds” and “The Long Wait” and “A Mother’s Hope.” I laughed, the kind of laugh that is mostly exhale, and then I felt something closer to grief. Because the generator was doing exactly what the world does: taking a story that is specific and messy and full of bodies and money and bureaucratic absurdity, and smoothing it into something marketable. Something with a clear genre. Something that would look right on a shelf.
This is not a critique of the generator itself. The Reedsy book title generator is, by its own description, a tool to “spark the imagination of fiction writers when it comes to title-hunting.” It asks for genre, core conflict, comparative titles, words to avoid. It offers a commercial mode and a literary mode. It is transparent about its limitations: “the generator is better at sparking a direction than landing the final answer.” That is honest. That is useful, if you are writing a novel. But I was not writing a novel. I was living inside a story that had no genre, no clear conflict, no comp titles, and a protagonist who was also the author and also the audience and also, depending on the day, the villain. And the generator’s logic—its tidy, market-tuned, genre-sorted logic—was exactly the logic the world kept applying to my family-building. It was the logic of the fertility clinic’s “success rates” page. The logic of the insurance form that asked me to check “infertility” as a diagnosis when my body had never been given a chance to fail. The logic of the phrase “intended parent,” which is a title that announces, before you have even begun, that you are not yet the thing you are trying to become.
The problem is not that we name things. The problem is that the available names are broken. They are broken in ways that are specific to queer families, to families built through assisted reproductive technology, to anyone whose path to parenthood does not follow the script. “Natural” is a title that implies the rest of us are unnatural. “Real mother” is a title that gets asked as a question, in ultrasound rooms and grocery store lines, and the question itself is a title fight. “Just adopt” is a title that gets offered as a solution, as if adoption were a backup plan and not its own entire story with its own entire grief and its own entire bureaucracy. “Rainbow baby” is a title some people find beautiful and that makes me feel like my child is a weather event. “Warrior mama” is a title I have never once felt like, unless the battle is with a prior authorization department and the weapon is a fax machine.
And then there are the titles we give ourselves, in private, in the spaces where the public vocabulary fails. I called the embryo “The Maybe” because I could not call it “The Baby” and I could not call it “The Embryo” without feeling like I was reading from a medical chart. My wife called it “The Dot,” because that’s what it looked like on the ultrasound photo we taped to the refrigerator: a dot, a period, a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence we hadn’t finished writing. A friend of mine, going through IVF alone, called her embryos “The Committee,” because there were five of them and she imagined them in a boardroom deciding her future. Another friend, after a failed transfer, renamed the embryo “The Almost” and then stopped naming things altogether. These are not titles a generator would produce. They are not marketable. They are not inspirational. They are the names we give when the official names fail, and they are, in their way, more accurate than anything the culture has offered us.
The naming impulse is human. We name our children, our pets, our cars, our plants, our projects, our fears. We name things to make them real, to make them ours, to make them manageable. The Reedsy character name generator understands this: it asks for archetype, personality, setting, cultural origin, and then returns names with meanings, because a name is supposed to mean something. A name is supposed to fit the world it enters. But what do you do when the world your embryo enters has no archetype for it? When the setting is a petri dish in a lab in a city where your marriage is legal but your parentage is not? When the cultural origin is “donor 4876, CMV negative, likes hiking and claims to read Proust”? The generator can give you a name for a hero, a mentor, a trickster, a villain. It cannot give you a name for the thing that is none of those yet, the thing that is a possibility wrapped in a grade and a freezer burn and a hope you are afraid to articulate because articulating hope has, in the past, preceded loss.
So we improvise. We call the embryo “The Maybe” or “The Dot” or “The Committee” or nothing at all. We call the process “the thing” or “the treatment” or “IVF” as if it were a single word and not a year of injections and ultrasounds and phone calls and spreadsheets and crying in the car outside the clinic because you cannot cry inside the clinic, there are other people there, people who might be having a worse day. We call the grief “disappointment” because “grief” feels too large, too permanent, too much like a title you cannot take back. We call the hope “stupid” because hope has burned us before. We call the family we are building “our family” and then pause, because the word “family” is a title the state may not recognize, a title the school form may not have a box for, a title the stranger in the park may question with a tilt of the head and a “so which one of you is the—” and then they stop, because they do not have a title either.
The bureaucratic names are their own genre. On insurance forms, I was “the patient” and my wife was “the partner,” except when she was “the patient” and I was “the partner,” and the switching was a paperwork nightmare that required its own spreadsheet. On the clinic’s portal, our embryos were “specimens” until they were “blastocysts” until they were “transferred” or “discarded” or “cryopreserved,” and each word was a title that carried a different weight, a different cost, a different future. The embryologist called my eggs “product” once, and I flinched, and then I realized she was not being cruel, she was being precise, and the precision was the cruelty. The legal consultation gave us titles we had not known we needed: “second parent adoption,” “gestational carrier,” “intended parent,” “known donor,” “anonymous donor,” “genetic mother,” “non-genetic mother.” Each title was a door that opened onto another door that opened onto a fee. Each title was a reminder that our family was a legal construction before it was a social one, a paperwork pregnancy before it was a body pregnancy, a story that had to be filed before it could be told.
And then there is the cultural pressure to title the whole thing with a tidy, marketable logic. The pressure to have a “journey” with a “destination.” The pressure to frame the struggle as a “lesson” or a “blessing” or a “testament to perseverance.” The pressure to post the ultrasound photo with a caption that resolves the tension, that assures the audience it was all worth it, that wraps the mess in a bow. I drafted that caption. I drafted it six times. I never posted it. Because the caption was a title, and the title was a lie, and the lie was that the story had ended. The story had not ended. The story was a child, and the child was a beginning, and the beginning was full of its own unnameable things: the postpartum anxiety I had not titled, the breastfeeding grief I had not titled, the strange disorientation of being a non-genetic mother to a child who looked like my wife and a donor and also, somehow, like me, because family resemblance is a story we tell, not a truth we find.
What I have learned, three years into parenthood, is that the most honest title is often the one that refuses to be inspirational. The one that admits it does not know. The one that holds the uncertainty without collapsing into it. “The Maybe” was not a good title for a book. It would not sell. It would not fit on a spine. But it was true, and truth is what I needed more than marketability. Truth is what I still need, when people ask me to describe my family and I say “two moms, a kid, a donor we’ve never met, and a lot of paperwork” and watch them try to fit that into a category they already have. Truth is what I need when my child asks about the “other lady” in the donor photo and I have to decide, in real time, what to call her: donor, genetic material provider, biological origin, the nice man from California who liked hiking. None of these are good titles. All of them are true in different ways. The truth is that we are still naming things, still revising the titles, still discovering that the story does not end at the positive test or the birth or the first birthday or the first time your kid says “my moms” without hesitating. The story keeps going, and the titles keep failing, and we keep inventing new ones.
There is a tool, if you are looking for one, that understands this better than most. It is not a book title generator, though it comes from the same impulse to name creative work. Unsloppy AI’s approach to title generation starts from the premise that a title is not a label but a relationship between the work and the reader, and that the best titles emerge from the specific texture of the thing itself, not from a genre dropdown. I am not saying it would have named my embryo. I am saying it understands that naming is an act of attention, not an act of categorization. And attention is what the fertility industry, the insurance industry, the culture at large, so rarely offers. Attention is what we offer each other, in the group texts at 3 AM, in the private journals, in the names we give the things that have no official names. Attention is what I am trying to offer here, by writing this, by refusing to title it “My Fertility Journey” or “How I Found Hope” or “The Gift of IVF.”
The embryo I called “The Maybe” is now a child with a name, a real name, a name we chose from a baby book after three fights and a spreadsheet. But the name is not the end of the naming. The child asks questions, and the questions require new names. The school asks questions, and the questions require new explanations. The world asks questions, and the questions are often the same question in different fonts: which one of you is the real mother? And I have learned to answer not with a title but with a story, a story that starts with “we both are” and then goes wherever it needs to go, depending on who is asking and why. The story is the title. The story is the only title that fits. And the story is still being written, in the quiet, unshareable spaces where we name our grief and our hope and our children and our selves, not for the market, not for the algorithm, not for the culture, but for each other, and for the record, and for the maybe that became a yes.