What’s In a Name
On February 16, 2015 | 0 Comments | children, Emma Grace, parenting |

Naming a child is a pretty big deal. Anyone who has ever done it will say so. Because while a person can change her name legally (someday) if she wants to, I think the process is a genuine and maybe expensive hassle. Meanwhile, she’ll have to live with the name long enough to decide she wants to change it.

Everyone I know takes it seriously, which is nice. And responsible. And while, for Bill and me, naming people is a long time in the rear-view, it is a subject I find fairly fascinating.

I think my parents did a nice job naming me and my sisters. They nabbed the name “Meghan” for my older sister before it had become popular, using the traditional Irish spelling, which is unusual. “Emily,” my younger sister’s name, has also become popular–but it wasn’t at the time.

I’ve always felt that my parents chose lovely, classic names for their girls, and I appreciate that.

The risk with classic names is obvious and the thing that many people try to avoid: that your child’s name will, in fact, become popular. That she will be one of a dozen Megans (with their various spellings) in her kindergarten class. That you will call to her across the playground and a full third of the girls at play will turn their heads.

 

It is this precisely that many pending parents work to avoid, resulting in some pretty fabulous creativity. More than once, I have found myself trolling lists of hipster baby names, delighted and dismayed by turns. These current trend-setters are reaching into the annals of literature and art and history to find names for their children, and their associations conjure all kinds of context.

Suffice it to say that I love this–both the delight and the dismay. I shouldn’t comment further because, sadly, I am wont to be critical. I don’t want to eat my words when, twenty years from now, I meet Septimus Atticus Smith, say, who was born in 2014 and turns out to be a really swell guy, despite his unwieldy first name and his plain failure to live up to his second (and could anyone?).

A potential danger is choosing a name because of how it reflects on us, the parents. A name that makes us seem clever, smart, even hip. But truly, in those first years at least, when the baby’s personality is fairly vague and even unformed, it’s the parents who–to great degree–assign identity, right? We choose their clothes, their bedroom furniture, the color of their walls. The toys they play with, the onesies they wear, the pattern in the fabric of diaper bag and car seat. The child’s name is, at the beginning, an extension of precisely these kinds of decisions.

The child is, most profoundly at the beginning, an extension of ourselves.

So how to choose the name that is her– and to do so successfully, at the very beginning, before you actually know her? Before, perhaps, she is born, or in those light-filled hours immediately after her birth, when she is pink and wrinkled and gazing at you cross-eyed and you can’t begin to know–not yet–how much you are going to love her? How to decide?

So I suppose you could say that Bill and I took the easy way out. It wasn’t the plan at first; it sort of evolved, but now I’m so glad: we named all three of our children–both of their names–for family. We reached into the annals of our lives and gave our children the names of people we loved and who had–so formatively–loved us.

It is the best of two worlds, anyway: classic, beautiful names that carried rich meaning before we knew the babies–now the people–they would become.

It’s the best of two worlds, I say.

Of course I knew that both William and Emma were well-used names when we chose them. Emma, in particular, was becoming common. In fact, in 2013, the names William (and its variant, Liam) and Emma were top names in many of these fifty states. But I thought we’d hit it out of the park with Everett: no one else  in 1998 was named Everett (and under the age of 60) for as far as the eye could see.

Wouldn’t you know, the name has rapidly been gaining popularity in recent years. It is seriously on the rise. I’ve overheard mothers calling to their (very) young sons in public places: “Everett!”  And of course I turn my head.

And Emma is one of a hundred Emmas. A hundred thousand or more. Her full name, Emma Grace, was the Very Same Name as another girl in her class for years.

But it doesn’t really matter. Not really. Because there’s a secret that every parent knows–and I’d love to impress this on the young, pending parents I know, the to-be parents who are agonizing over choosing the Right Name, over being Original, over the impossible task of finding and assigning the right identity, embedded in a name, to their unborn or newborn child.

Here is the secret, dear ones: No matter how many others share your child’s name, no matter how many Williams, or Everetts, or Emmas you know

Yours will really, actually, absolutely be the Only One.

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