A Child By Any Other Name

Some girls have favorite baby names picked out even before they fawn over their first crush. The chosen names are given to favorite dolls or stuffed animals until finally being bestowed, just as decisively, on their own children.

I wasn’t one of these girls.

I imagined possible baby names as much as the next person, I suppose, but the names always changed. One year I’d want the name of the character in a favorite book, and the next year I’d want the name of a newly-discovered ancestor. So when I eventually married and got pregnant, I didn’t have a lot of solid ideas to bring to the table. My husband, Andy, didn’t either, though his one requirement seemed to be that the name be as traditional as possible. “How about Mike?” he suggested, “Or Bill?” I regarded him with thinly-disguised disdain. “I thought we could pick something just a tad more, um, interesting,” I finally offered.

I was thinking of my friend Paula, who named her son American Xavier. And boy did she catch hell for it. He’ll be the butt of all the playground jokes, people prophesied. She’d respond that all kids get made fun of for something or other. If it’s not your name, it’s that you wear glasses or have bad teeth. And she turned out to be right. Now ten years old, American is never mocked for his name. He’s a cool kid in a small school among others with similarly non-traditional names, so his name doesn’t even really stand out.

I knew my husband would never go for something as interesting as American, though I did love the name India Rose for a little girl. I even had visions of our little India someday marrying American, thus forming an American-India union. But Andy put his foot down, refusing to name our maybe-daughter after, as he put it, a hot country. Eventually we settled on Sara for a girl and Jonah for a boy. The name Jonah was my idea and a hard sell, being a little too unusual for Andy’s taste - though I argued he could just call the kid Joe.

So when on March 7, 2002, I gave birth to a baby boy, Jonah he became, middle name Russell after my recently-deceased grandfather. It seemed I’d chosen a name that pleased everyone – my Catholic family liked that I’d chosen a saint’s name, Andy could “normalize” the name to Joe, and I enjoyed the rare-enough appeal of the name. Interestingly enough, most of the time Andy refers to our son by his full name, spoken fast -- JonahRussell – and has never, not even once, called him Joe.

The thing I’d never considered is how kids will tend to take on the characteristics of the name they are given. Paula’s son American, for example, absolutely loves sports, cars, hot dogs, and blond women. And Jonah (like Jonah and the whale), who also happens to be a Pisces (the fish), could live happily in a big tank of water. He'd take six baths a day if we let him, and will swim in a pool until his skin shrivels. Coincidence? Who knows. But definitely something to consider.

You might not want to pick Damien, for example, if what you want is a little angel. And I can't recommend naming your kid something completely out there, like Soda, as Seinfeld's George Kastanza once proposed. Some names are downright nutty; you gotta draw the line somewhere, after all.

But in general, if you’re choosing a baby name, I say go ahead and pick whichever one makes you happy. Don’t worry about what other people have to say; it’s not their kid to name.

Whatever you decide, don’t sweat it too much. After all, a child by any other name will smell just as stinky in a soiled diaper!