Naming names
Posted: February 7, 2005 Filed under: Uncategorized 9 Comments »We had brunch with some good friends this weekend, the kind of friends you don’t see very often but she read a poem at our wedding and we usually have a rough idea of what is going on in their lives. That kind of friends.
She’s 7 months pregnant and he has become suddenly overly opinionated about all things baby-related. I got into two separate arguments with him and I’ve been mad ever since.
One was about nannies. He is very anti-nanny and his reason is that he thinks that his child would then have a closer relationship with the nanny than with him and his wife. “It’s a good deal for the kids and for the nanny but it’s a rotten deal for the parents,” he said authoritatively.
Luckily I wasn’t on my own to fight this one out. My little sister was with us for the weekend. Both she and I were partially raised by The Most Wonderful Nanny In The Entire World. Only back then in Phoenix, AZ you didn’t call them nannies; she was my babysitter. In any case, we were not going to sit back and allow her profession to be defamed in such a manner.
I tried to explain the concept of love to him – “By that logic, you will stop loving your first child when your second child comes around,” I said. “There’s no set supply of love. There’s plenty of love. The more people the kid loves the better.”
There was no convincing him. He is not secure enough in his parental role, obviously, and I should probably have given the guy a break – he’s about to be a dad for the first time and doesn’t have any idea what’s going on right now. He finally backed off because he could tell he’d “hit a nerve.”
Wes, who easily chalked the first argument up to first time parent jitters (well, yeah, Wes didn’t have a nanny – his mother spent every waking moment with him from the second he was conceived until… well, until me, basically. When I say this to Wes, he says, “Nuh-uh! One time she wouldn’t play with me.” My heart weeps for him.), also found this second argument obnoxious.
We were talking names, which was our first mistake. Most pregnant New Yorkers don’t discuss names, especially once the name has been decided. There is a fear of the good name being “stolen,” and an even bigger fear of the inevitable name stories – “Oh, I once knew a Ryan – he was this horrible, ugly kid with hairy feet.” And suddenly, your perfect, cherished name doesn’t sound as lovely as it once did.
We should know this. It’s just that we have had our names picked out since approximately 1998 (well, the girl name, anyway), and it always felt so far away that we didn’t really give a shit what anyone said about it and I told them pretty freely.
Our friends are having a boy and do not yet have a name picked out. They both have extremely plain, common, normal, monosyllabic names. They are looking into more plain, common, normal names for their son. Not so surprising. What I had forgotten was that the name he uses is not his given first name, but his middle name. The first name he was given is, unfortunately, a girl’s name. Crown me Queen of Genderless Names, yes. I am the last person to qualify names in this way. But his name is, unfortunately a girl’s name. And boys with girl names do not do well in middle school. He has one of those names that was once genderless or even more on the masculine side, but which is now squarely in the girl’s camp – sort of like Leslie or Ashley.
Anyway, I had forgotten this, and I spilled our names. Our boy name he liked fine, but our girl name he flipped out over. He was furious with us. He kept insisting that we change our mind, that we were going to ruin the kid’s life. He even said, “Well, I hope for your child’s sake that you have a boy,” which is really obnoxious because I have such a huge, massive desire for a daughter.
His objection centered around the fact that the name is a boy’s name. It is, however, a somewhat obscure Danish boy’s name, the first name of a Danish philosopher that I discovered in my cafe-ridden high school days and which Wes studied for his philosophy major in college. He was a precursor to existentialism, a religious man who asked a lot of questions about the relationship between religion and free will. He is a great pick for us, a good melding of our two life views and our pasts. And Wes’ eyes light up every time we say the name.
After this brunch debacle, I spent the rest of the day beginning to doubt myself. My sister supported my doubt – her concern was over the sound of the name with our last names, the two s’s in a row troubling her. I started to think, “Maybe I don’t love this name. Maybe I won’t love the name of my own daughter. That’s so unfair!”
I pulled out the name book, and we spent Saturday night reading the entire thing cover to cover. We drank champagne and called out names. Nothing. It wasn’t even like I found something I loved and Wes hated. There was nothing that I loved. There was nothing I liked even remotely better than the one we picked in 1998.
I had trouble sleeping.
Sunday evening, Wes and I sat in a Barnes & Noble cafe with a stack of baby name books. We read endless names. We giggled like crazy. We had a ball.
And we found no other name that we liked even half as much.
In the end, it just made me more sure about the name we’ve chosen. Because somehow, in the decade and a half since I was a crazy future-planning teenager picking out flowery Italian girly names for my daughter, all of those names have fallen away.
What’s left is the way it feels in my stomach
when I see the way Wes’ eyes look
when I say the name of our daughter.
Watch – after all of this we’ll have a boy.
Is Wes as crazy for a girl as you are? I’m curious because Bill wants a boy sooooooo bad and I go back and forth on it…And I admit, sometimes I want a girl just to challenge my at times overly boycentric husband.
He would like a girl mostly because we already have the manboy gargantuan teenager kid. I’m probably a bit more crazy about it. I think I have mellowed considerably about it over the past several years, though, and I would be happy either way – I think finding a boy name I like as much as the girl name actually made me more able to imagine it, strangely enough.
personally, I have always liked your girl name and think it is a good kind of alliteration.
This weekend I had coffee with a pregnant friend. She is having a boy and is close to choosing a boy name that I really like (Stefan). I like it b/c D proposed outside of a church called San Stefano. I felt awkward and finally didn’t tell her that it is a name I have thought about too. But now I can never use that name she’ll think I’m copying her! I guess it doesn’t matter because D. hates the name anyway.
You think you have it bad? Chinese-Americans usually have to come up with two names for one child: a Chinese name and an American name. The American name is usually a lot easier to decide.
However, picking a Chinese name is almost a horrific ordeal apparently. Some believe that boy names must pertain to intelligence or hopes, whereas girl names must be about nature.
And then you must have the approval of all the elders in the family to make it official, whereby creating a neverending shouting match of “oh we can’t pick a name today due to the Chinese calendar… it’s bad luck…”
My father chose my Chinese name, but really the responsibility was supposed to go to the eldest and most scholarly male in the family. A Chinese name not only has to sound right, but also the meaning of the name must fit the child. And then the poor child MUST learn how to write the characters to his/her name properly or it reflects poorly on the parents upbringing. Oy!
My Chinese name means, “Heavenly Blessing” since my parents didn’t believe they could have children, so there’s no pressure for me to live up to my name. Being born was enough. However, my father’s name is “Heavenly Genius.” Now THAT’s a name to live up to… My mother’s name is something like “Jade Eagle” or something like that, which sounds pretty in Chinese, and as usual deals with nature.
http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames
With a Chinese name, how doo they know what sort of name will fit the child when thay aren’t even fully human as an infant? I think my Chinese name would be something like “obsessive rabbit” but my parents wouldn’t have known that until I was at least 2 (that’s the age when I started cleaning up anything I thought was dirty).
The practice of providing a Chinese name to a child differs from family to family depending on province, village, individual, etc. Some just take parts of a name from a family member and add to it. For example, my father is Tien-Choy=”Heavenly Genius,” and my brother is, Siu-Choy=”Little Genius” (aka Junior). But other families will go to the extreme of looking at the Chinese calendar or through Chinese scriptures to find a name. The name also has to sound nice.
The center of Chinese culture is the family: You serve at the will of your parents (and elders). You respect the wishes of your elders no matter what. ABC’s (American Born Chinese) are usually conflicted with this system, as you can imagine. What is considered to be ‘as American as Apple Pie’, at times may conflict with the traditional Chinese belief system. But they are usually resolved by factors like what generation ABC you are, or how traditional your Chinese upbringing is/was.
My parents raised me to be semi-traditional Chinese, where I know how to write my name in Chinese, practice appropriate protocol when in social situations with my parents, etc. However, more traditional ABC’s who have had a more traditional upbringing know their responsibilities living up to their name, what’s expected of them depending on if he/she is the eldest or the youngest in the family, etc.
Another major factor within the Chinese culture is to always honor and never do anything to dishonor your family name. Living up to the expectations of your given Chinese name would be included in this practice.
As with other cultures, there are always hidden meanings in everything. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), those so-called ‘secrets’ have given the Chinese the label of being “exotic” and/or “mystic” at times.
BTW, in Mandarin your name would be pronounced:
“Chanzhu Tuzi”
chanzhu= to obsess
tuzi=rabbit
I must say, it seems much, much easier not being Chinese. Next time I see you, you must say “Chanshu Tuzi” for me.
Apparently, now there is a way to not be Chinese anymore… EYELID SURGERY!
http://www.drmeronk.com/asian/asian-eyelid-oper5.html
* Caution! Explicit Images!
- Getting back to the gross topic, Asians can now eliminate the ‘squinty eye’ look by surgically acquiring eyelids.
For those who aren’t into the actual step-by-step procedure:
http://www.drmeronk.com/asian/asian-eyelid-photos.html