The Name Game

It feels a little strange to be "done" with the naming process already. While our Bambin@ doesn't have a name yet, we think we're about as done as we intend to be before meeting the baby in person.We have two full (first and middle) girls' names and "one" boys' name (really two possibilities, but they're just the first and middle flip-flopped, so whatever name we choose will rule out the other name for a future son).

I was always one of those people who had a mental list of future baby names. Even during the years when I felt strongly that I didn't want to have children, the planner in me still felt the need to have a list of names I would use for them if I changed my mind. 

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the process of naming an actual baby is hard. 

First of all, it's a lot harder to decide on a name for a baby when there's someone else in the picture who gets equal say. I'm not saying that I wish that Ben had been more disinterested in our baby's name, but rather that I just hadn't realized that it would be possible that he could dislike so many of the top names from my middle school lists -- or that once I was told that one of them had been vetoed, I would suddenly feel like it was the only right name for our baby. I had always thought that the biggest problem would be to choose one name out of so many great contenders. I never thought that we might find ourselves in a situation where we'd be looking for a needle in a haystack.

The second difficulty was that, when it came to naming an actual baby -- one who is growing inside me and tickling me as I write this -- I found that even my own list shrunk considerably. Suddenly, names that seemed cool in a baby name book seemed silly or weird when applied to a child that would be part of our family. Naming a baby is such a huge responsibility. I read once that "naming a baby is like choosing a tattoo for a sleeping person." That kind of stuck with me. Just because I thought a name was cool didn't mean that I was prepared to give it to my kid -- whose future "coolness" is currently of an unknown nature. I'd suggest a name to Ben and even as I read it out loud, I'd know that it felt wrong. Versatility became a priority.  

The third difficulty has been that I am an awkward person who thinks an awful lot about what others think of me. In today's climate of "anything goes" with baby names, each individual name announcement reflects more and more information about the parents. Something tells me that families didn't really describe themselves as having a naming "style" until relatively recently. Oh sure, there were certainly names associated with ethnic groups, and I'm sure that there were certain names that would get passed around within a family -- either as honor names, or just from familiarity. But I'm guessing that categories like, "Geeky Chic" were probably not really a thing until the past 20 years or so -- or maybe even more recently. I find myself pondering questions like, "Is this name a little too hipster?" or "Would this baby name make my family look like wannabe ranchers?" Set aside the worries about whether the name will be versatile enough to fit Bambin@ of the Future -- even before we get to the point where our child might resent his/her own name, we have to contend with the fact that the choice sends a message about us too.

Having all those options and choices -- and having those choices attached to specific styles....and having those styles determine whether your choice for the next baby's name will "fit" with the first baby's -- is pretty overwhelming. Laura Wattenberg wrote in The Baby Name Wizard: 

Nothing makes a choice harder than choices -- lots of choices. You go to the store to buy a flashlight; they have one flashlight: you buy it, you're happy. If they have twenty flashlights, though, you agonize, and probably go home worried that you didn't make the best possible selection. Now suppose there are 10,000 flashlights, and you'll have to keep the one you choose for the rest of your life. Is it any wonder that picking a baby name can be stressful?

It's the same concept as shopping at Aldi versus other grocery stores. Sometimes it's nice to just have some limitations to the options. It's also one of the (many) reasons that we bought our crib and changing table at Ikea rather than pacing the floor of Babies R Us. (More on our experiences with shopping and creating our registries in a later post . . .)

I'm not saying that I hate having options. If we had only as many names to choose from as there are cribs at Ikea, there would be a lot of repeats in every classroom. I like the fact that the current trend is for parents to choose more unusual names for their kids -- mostly because it makes my own name seem less weird.

The point of this post, though, was not to go off on a philosophical journey discussing the paradox of choice and the meaning of a name in today's society, but rather to celebrate the fact that I think we've finally settled into as much of a "decision" as we intend to make before the baby is born.

And that's all for now.