What’s in a name?
From the moment I discovered I was pregnant I was instantly thinking of names.
Truth be told I had been thinking of ones longer than that, but nothing was ever set in concrete. I didn’t have a boyfriend so the chances were very slim of me becoming pregnant… although it happened to the Virgin Mary right?
When I was born I did not have a name for around a week. When I was named my mother had chosen something unique, being a combination of parts of her name and my grandmothers. To this day I am yet to meet another me and that is awesome, but just to make things easier and avoid the millions of questions or the incorrect pronunciations I simply go by my nickname. Don’t get me wrong I love my name, I just like to avoid the conversation that follows when people can’t say, read or understand my name.
I have been given a few baby name books over the course of my pregnancy and I have read them cover to cover and I have struggled to find anything I liked or could see myself yelling out in the near future. Yes, I will be that mother who stands at the back door and screams out my kids name trying to get he or she to come inside for dinner or to stop beating their future siblings up or not to eat the dog poo! There’s no need to feel sorry for my neighbours though as we live on acreage, so I’m not going to be the crazy lady from next door that screams at her kids all the time.
I pity all those school teachers who have spent years educating the young. I believe naming your child after all the years of teaching snotty nosed brats would be a super hard task. There would definitely be a pattern of naughty boys and girls’ names that would send shivers down your spine when you even thought of naming your unborn child after them.
My fiancée and I have just 1 name of each gender picked out for our baby.
Out of all those hundreds of thousands of names in those books I was given I had less than a handful I liked. I wasn’t sure if I was just being overly fussy but there were literally 4 names I didn’t absolutely hate.
I would look to see it was suitable for a little boy/girl name and something that would continue through with them as an adult. I’d check that the nickname that it could be broken down to wasn’t horrible and cause years of bullying in the playground and lastly and most importantly it had to suit our surname.
I spent months agonizing on the spelling of things and was desperate to ensure it was not a bogan like name or spelling. I cringe when I see little kids with names spelt so wrong I remember my friend telling me about a kid named ABCDE- (No that s not the alphabet it is meant to say Absidee) Add to that Anfernee, Maffew, Bacardee, Sef, Nafanial and you will get where I am heading on this subject and if you don’t see what is wrong with the above mentioned names well you need to go back to school and learn how to spell!!
I also would have vivid dreams of my children running around in the playground except they didn’t look like children, instead they looked like midget old people with names like Harold, Albert, Hazel, Deidre. I think this was my subconscious way of making fun of my biggest fear naming my poor baby with a name that is 70 years too old for them.
On the other hand I would spend time daydreaming of when my baby had grown up and was on the dating scene and trying to introduce themselves to potential suitors. G’day my name is Apple, Diamond, Milo, Zinzan.
I just couldn’t do it to my child or myself for that matter, to give them names like that. They’d be 50 year old virgins still living at home cramping my style and as much as I will have all the love in this
