I’ve always been fascinated with names. Growing up, as an avid short-story writer, I spent many a rainy day compiling lists of monikers for potential characters. Other kids collected polished rocks or foreign coins. I collected names.
Granted, most of these were Tolkien-esque tongue-twisters that I’d never, in hindsight, give to a real child. (If it were up to my 13-year-old self, our kids would have unpronounceable names like Sylarriahniah or Eiselhaffteryn.)
Names held a certain magic for me, and still do.
So when we were expecting our first child, I was looking forward to the naming process. I spent countless hours poring over baby name websites, notating meanings, trying different combinations, and speaking them aloud. And, over the course of nine months, I started to get overwhelmed. There were just so many choices. And it was such a big decision.
Choosing a name for the new human being you’ve created is one of the most exciting parts of parenthood. But it’s also one of the most daunting. After all, your kid will not only live with that name for a lifetime; that name will forever be part of their lineage, written in stone for the ages.
So it’s not surprising that settling on a name doesn’t come easy for decision-challenged folks like me. With my first pregnancy, every time I considered a potential name for the little human tumbling around in my tummy, I imagined our future descendants browsing through their equivalent of Ancestry a thousand years from now. They’ll stumble across my son’s name and screw up their faces. “What?!” They’ll exclaim in their future language, “I had an ancestor named that?”
It felt like the perfect name was out there somewhere, just out of reach. If only I looked hard enough, turned over enough stones, made it far enough down on the Top 10,000 Names of All Time, I’d have that “a-ha!” moment.
Meaghan O’Connoll describes this phenomenon of the “perfect-name delusion” (my words) in her utterly relatable book on motherhood, And Now I Have Everything:
I picture our [unborn] baby’s name floating somewhere just beyond my consciousness, like when you forgot a word and know that as soon as you stop trying to remember, it will come to you. Except in this case, it doesn’t.
Four years later, and now on pregnancy No. 3, I’ve finally reached that realization: There is no perfect name.
This epiphany didn’t come immediately. As soon as the line on that pregnancy test turned blue, I started pondering names. I dug up the old lists we’d made with the first two pregnancies, and somehow they all felt inadequate. I felt compelled to start from scratch. And so I combed through the Social Security lists name-by-name for the umpteenth time, scouring for the entry that was the just-right balance of traditional and modern, unique yet not unheard-of, meaningful and memorable, and maybe even with some nugget of connection to our family history. (Spoiler: I still haven’t found it.)
To be fair, there’s something to be said for taking a fresh look at names. Over the years, things change: your tastes shift, you meet other people’s kids with the names you once considered for your own, and, for inexplicable reasons, names that once seemed charming now sound hideous. (Case in point: Hjalmer. A family name I once thought would be a cute alternative to Bjorn or Soren. Thank goodness my husband talked me out of that one.)
Ultimately, though, you end up facing the same conundrum, staring at a list of letters on a page, wondering how in the world you can make such a weighty, seemingly eternal decision on behalf of someone you haven’t even met yet.
I suppose this decision foreshadows the countless difficult parenting decisions we’ll face on this motherhood journey. And, in the big picture, it’s not even the biggest decision by far. The way we parent on a day-to-day basis, instilling the right values, modeling the right behaviors, guiding our children down the right paths—these innumerable decisions shape their identities in ways far more profound than a name.
Besides, kids have a way of growing into their names (and their nicknames). Before considering it for my firstborn, the name “Elliott” conjured up a shy, bookly boy, timid and diminutive, with glasses too large for his face. Now, the name seems a perfect fit for my spunky, extroverted, 99th-percentile of a 3-year-old.
And for our daughter Ophelia, we could never have imagined the nickname “Fifi.” But now, as a feisty prima donna of an almost-2-year-old, it fits her perfectly. (Don’t worry; we’ll shift to “Fia” as she gets older.)
In the end, a name is just a name. Letters on paper, sounds in the air. There is no perfect name, just like there is no perfect wedding dress, no perfect birth experience, no perfect body, no perfect spouse, no perfect anything…except for that tiny newborn baby who, when you finally get to meet him or her, will be perfect in every way.
{Photo Credit: Ginger Murray}
