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.

Baby Names, Part I

When my wife, Lisa, told me she was pregnant, the first thing I said was, “My life is over,” which was not, she has since informed me, the most reassuring thing to say. To make it worse, I alternated between saying, “My life is over,” and rolling into a ball onto the bed and not saying anything. Finally, my wife said, “Okay, you don’t get to do that anymore.”

While Lisa was as scared as I was, she was also happy and excited. I wasn’t unhappy, but I felt like an unwitting Frankenstein. I wondered what biological horror I was releasing on the world.

Not to say I never wanted a child. But I had planned to get everything under control first. I someday wanted to have children. The vagueness of the someday was reassuring. In the interim between now and someday, I would secure regular and fulfilling employment. Someday, I would get my life together. This wasn’t a precise event. I liked the vagueness of the image of myself as a peaceful father taking his baby for walks in a stroller. It was going to happen someday, after a lot of contingencies had been met.

A year before, I had set into action a series of motions that resulted in my leaving my job of five years and my wife leaving her first professional job. We broke away from our secure, locked-in professional trajectories in the city where we had both grown up.

I spent my days on the eighth floor of a silver office tower looking over the stop-and-go traffic on Interstate Five. I became accustomed to the white noise of freight trucks carrying battered containers from the Port of Seattle, county transit busses, the lines of passenger cars vibrating against the window that in order to concentrate away from work I listened to white noise. I found a copy of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and played the grinding-clanging noise to clear my head. Seattle is a city awash in the incessant groan of movement. The city was cut like a tic-tac-toe diagram by freeways. Jets tumbled through the low-lying haze. Freight trains and commuter busses rumbled in subterranean passages. Ferries bellowed from the bay. Float planes buzzed office buildings as they splashed into Lake Union. Ambulances and rescue copters careened to and from the heights of Pill Hill. News copters trolled the byways documenting blockages in the steady, ceaseless motion of the city.

My wife and I left to pursue a creative writing degree in Baltimore with no resulting profession at the end in a place we knew nothing about except that Edgar Allen Poe had lived there, once.

We found Baltimore silent in comparison to Seattle. The only sign of air traffic might be a contrail etched in the blue sky. The city had trains, but they ran on tracks built into deep trenches cut under the city. Walking once I stood on a mysterious bridge and could feel the passage then of a train. I peered through the sooty grill work, down a long bricked wall, to a track and a single engine, a green cabin with a large red number 5 painted in a white circle on the side, passed down the track. I could hear the weather in Baltimore. When the rain fell the water warbled into the storm drains. Human voices carried, too. I could hear people calling hello to other people they knew on the street. But mostly, it seemed, people kept quiet in Baltimore -- aware of maybe protective of -- the silence.

We lived in a mostly empty, gigantic apartment that was beyond our means even though was paid far less rent than we’d paid in Seattle. Because it cost so much to move across country, we had bought the bare minimum of what we needed in Baltimore. It arrived on a flat from the warehouse. We didn’t have any money, not even a dollar, to tip the deliverymen because we had spent just about everything in the move and the last of our money on groceries. We handed them cold rootbeers from the fridge. For the first time in our lives, our apartment had a unified decor, even though it looked like we had wandered into one of the cheery display rooms from ikea: blonde woods, fresh press board shelves with bright metal fittings, primary color wool rugs on the hard wood floors. For the first time in our lives, our days passed pretty much along our own terms. We did precisely what we wanted to do everyday as long as it didn’t cost a thing.

This instant, new life in Baltimore -- with its unfamiliar, crumbling brick neighborhoods, its broad boulevards thick with deciduous trees, its fruit sellers driving horses and vegetable carts through our neighborhood in October hollering pumpkins pumpkins pumpkins had an otherworldliness compared to our cramped professional lives in Seattle. I felt I had exerted some degree of control and it had resulted in absolute change. Although we lived a provisional existence, with my enrollment in graduate school and Lisa not working, our new life demonstrated that we could actually take action rather than wait for things to happen to us. My work meetings consisted of class preparations and talking about how to best teach plot structure to eighteen year olds. It didn’t consist of an analysis of routing schemes for Boise Office Product Catalogs. I was happy.

By Christmas, I began to plan what would happen in the following year after my program ended. I found that exerting a forceful vision of how our lives could be, could actually change things. This seems obvious I suppose, but my family for generations had lived not through careful preparations but had its existence constantly shattered by the biological imperatives of addiction or madness. That I could want to do something, plan to do it, and actually accomplish it was a discovery. It was counter to all of the major lessons of my life.

When Lisa announced she was pregnant, I thought, then, that my life was finished. This was a result of a biological backlash, randomness and genetics taking over. Before her pregnancy, I had begun to wonder if my wife and I had gone sterile. I didn’t think she was barren or that I was sterile, but that by our adherence to our peculiar, locked-in routines we had been able to get away with the rhythm method for almost ten years without resulting in a pregnancy. Ten years, not out of any religious reason except perhaps for a remaining family history of Catholicism. With about a ten-percent failure rate, our time was more than up. For ten years nothing, and then as soon as we relaxed our guard and took a risk, biology asserted itself.

I don’t know what to call the problems that have beset my mother and father’s families. A curse or maybe just bad luck, but bad luck indicates that at some point something external to the family had descended on them. They moved to a poisoned house and the family began to become sick and die. They drove across black ice and the car flipped into the ditch. A father somewhere down the line suffered a heart attack and left the family penniless. These things might be tragedies, but the family itself just had bad luck and bad luck isn’t persistent. The family moves out of the poisoned house. The survivors of the car wreck heal their broken bones and burry the dead and eventually the accident becomes that bad thing that happened a long time ago. The destitute family gradually recovers, finds work, saves money, goes on with their life. A curse is more accurate because a curse is persistent, it clings to the family and tragedies continue to occur in the family. From these tragedies the family does not recover because they are the source of poison in a house. The survivors nurse their wounds and refuse to burry the dead. The destitute family does not find work, cannot save money, and wonders not how something like this happened to them but has expected it and says something like this bound to happen and bound to happen again. And it does happen again. Both of my families were cursed. Which means: I was double cursed.

I also felt like fatherhood would require a capitulation to the worst of my past. I either had to come to terms with all of these things in a mere nine months (when it had taken me thirty years just to identify all of the things I had to come to terms with) or my life would become the mad, drug-fueled scramble for existence that had characterized the early years of my own childhood. In my worldview, children were raised on muddy farms in the middle of the woods in handy vicinity to strawberry fields, swimming holes, and marijuana plantations. I didn’t have a farm. I didn’t own swimming trunks. I didn’t have any dope.