Baby Names, Part 2

I began to focus on the one thing I could control. I could research and find a name for our child. At first this was a data problem. I had to compile as many appropriate names as I could. My wife and I had a long list of male and female names. We slowly narrowed down the long lists of potential names into likely names. We knocked the top choices off because they were too popular in Washington State (and so began to build the narrative around her name.) One: that she was unique. For 2000, Emma was the fifth most popular name. Ella, a compromise on Emma, was struck off because it suggested Ella Fitzgerald. In the aesthetic battle of jazz singers, there was the Ella camp and the Billie camp. We couldn’t name our child Billie because I would take to calling her Bill. We did not want her to be a Bill. Once she had a gender and then we had a name, Riley, our daughter really began to exist. We thought her name made her sound like someone who would bash things in with her boots, her initials spelled "REB." Each glimpse of our daughter in the ultrasound provided no real clues about what she might be like, but confirmed an unexpected gathering together of features. As fuzzy as the images were, warped and full of noise, an individual began to take shape.

After the third trimester we told our parents about our baby. I still felt the sense that this was the worst time to have a child; however our parents were thrilled. Lisa’s mother said something about wondering if we were even able to have children, it had been so long since we’d been married. “You wonder about these things,” she said. “You never know how it is with someone else.” My mother could hardly speak for a minute and then she asked, “What will her name be?”

“We’re working on it.”

“It should be a family name,” she said. “I regret that I didn’t name your brother and you using family names. I think it would have made you closer to the family.”

My mother exhaled smoke on the other end of the line. A whispery gush came from the ear piece. In that single brush of sound I could see her apartment in North Seattle, a row of grey apartments with moss beginning to spread across the shingles from the shade of stand of fir and alder. She would sit at the lip of the door to her patio. Her plants grew lush under the water spilled from the gutters. She grew ferns and dahlias and kept stacks of unused plastic pots on a weathered gardening table her father had built from thin strips of lumber. It was more of a suggestion of a table than an actual table, each slate spaced about an inch apart so that potting soil or water would drop to the ground.

When Lisa and I married, we’d spent a couple of months thinking about jointly changing our last names. I was interested in this because it would formally separate myself from my family. At that time my mother suggested I change my name to her maiden name, Huxley.

“That’s another thing I regret about marry your father,” she had said then, “is that I had to give up my name.”

After she finished exhaling, my mother said, “Pauline.”

“What?”

“That’s a family name. It’s a good name. One thing you can’t do is name her Mildred,” this was my mother’s name, “that wouldn’t work.”

“We thought about it, but then we’d have to name her middle name, Margaret,” I said. This was the name of Lisa’s mother. “Or the other way around, and then what do we do? Draw straws?”

“Of course,” my mother said. “I’ll send you a list of names you can choose from.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Naming our child became a way of building an identity for her, of imagining the person we wanted her to be. With a name, we had a character in the story of her life and we could imagine how she would address the dramas of her live -- going off to kindergarten where she would sit in a classroom for the first time and have to listen the teacher say her name. The teacher would say, “Riley,” and our child would say, “That’s me.”

These narratives remained optimistic and reassuring as Lisa came closer to her due date, and then, Riley arrived to refute her name and our narratives, to become herself, a person who would do things and perform in her own way despite our parental intentions and despite, I hoped, her biological inheritance.

During labor, the nurse coached my wife Lisa through the birthing process, a euphemism for what was really going on, which was that a complete, human baby was being expelled from my wife’s central body cavity -- forcing my wife’s bones and tissue to jar open and let this baby’s skull, torso, arms, legs, and scream into the world. After four days of labor, at seven-and-three-quarters inches dilated, Lisa pleaded her case. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” A man wearing thick black-framed glasses wheeled a squeaking cart into the room and strung a fishing wire thin line into Lisa’s back to numb her nervous system. Eventually the baby was on its way out and suddenly Riley was no longer inside and part of my wife, but she was a crying infant clinging to Lisa’s breasts, an entire person drenched in a gush of bodily fluids. She was not a potential, a name, a story, a patchwork person like I had expected, but whole. And I was her father.