Apologies for my long absence. It was longer than I had anticipated (oh how naive I was about how easy it is to get preemie velcro babies to nap!) but I'm hoping to blog a little more regularly. As promised, here is the full story on how I came to choose my son's name.
Avoidance
When I was pregnant, one of the most common things people said to me was "Oh I bet you have loads of names lined up" or "You must already know what names you want to use".
I get it. Surely this is the pinnacle for a self-professed ‘name obsessive’: the time they get to put their passion into practice and name a real human. The truth for me was completely the opposite. I had no names lined up. In fact, I actively avoided talking about names with my partner until I was about 28 weeks pregnant.
I have been obsessed with names since I was a child. I love finding out about their origins, stories and tracking them through statistics. I love what lessons they tell me about the past and also our modern times. But through it all, I’ve lost my perspective. In my years of researching, the pool of names I’ve been exposed to have just got wider to the point where I’m overwhelmed by choice. I swoon over Alice and Artemisia equally, though in slightly different ways, and don't baulk at Grahaigh or Aoibhgreine.
When it came to choosing a name, it felt like I was at an all-you-can-eat buffet with a million dishes and only a tiny plate.
Sometimes I think that names have, for me, become like a collection of china dolls or mint-condition Star Wars memorabilia. They are there to be admired, examined and generally looked at from a safe distance, and I know the whole background and history of each item. But they are not to be used in everyday life! [though of course, that is their primary function!].
And, it’s not just the sheer number of names to choose from or my steady detachment that was an issue:
- Being a Primary School teacher already meant that so many names were attached to previous pupils in my mind.
- I live in a rather conservative naming area where anything outside of the top 50 is considered outlandish.
- Thanks to my self-professed name obsession, people were expecting an outlandish choice from me. I had several people tell me they'd be disappointed if I didn't use an "interesting" name.
- I found that I was imposing too many rules on myself -- from initials that followed family patterns to syllable flow -- and nixing names that I loved for arbitrary reasons. I put too much pressure on myself to get find the perfect name. To live up to my own expectations for myself as a namer.
Knuckling Down
As we chose not to find out the gender, I was faced with a double job of name choosing -- or avoidance in my case.
The only thing that I was able to comfortably settle on early in the pregnancy was middle names for a boy. Brian is the name of my partner's grandfather who he is very close to and who would be our child's only living great-grandparent. Our baby, in turn, would be Brian's first great-grandchild so it seemed like a lovely link between these two generations. I was also very close to my grandfather Kenneth so I felt that I also wanted his legacy to be passed on in our son's name.
So the sentimental middle names were agreed for a boy, but nothing else. I was absolutely avoiding discussing names with my partner as I feared that any names I had attempted to settle on in my mind that fit my strict criteria would be rejected and I'd have to go through the whole agonising elimination process again.
Eventually, I bit the bullet and printed off a copy of the Top 1000 (with multiple spellings and hyphens edited out). My partner went off to work with a copy that he could highlight in his breaks, and I did the same on my computer. No discussion, no haggling. We both just went through the list on our own being guided by gut instinct. When we put both lists together, we looked to see which names we both had in common. There were four boys' names and two girls' names in common. We had a list! We could settle on which one when Baby arrived.
Crunch Time
When I was 30 weeks pregnant, I went for a routine scan, feeling perfectly well and fine. Things snowballed from there rapidly, and my little boy arrived by emergency caesarian in the early hours of the following morning. He was whisked off to Neonatal and I was hooked up to various machines and drips because I had been diagnosed with HELLP syndrome.
For almost twelve hours, I only saw my son via photographs on a phone. I couldn't hold him, couldn't comfort him, but the one thing I could give him was an identity. In those early hours, it felt vitally important to give him a name that I could call him by. The whole situation was so emotionally and physically detached as it was that I hated the idea of referring to him as "The Baby".
Naming him promptly was one of the few ways I could form a bond while we were kept apart.
We discussed the agreed four names on our boys' list. One of them (10 letters) felt a little too 'grand' for a tiny baby of only 2lb 5oz; one had two accepted spellings that we disagreed over, and another was the name of the anaesthetist in my C-section. While he had been great, the name was now connected to a traumatic event in my mind which just felt a bit too close for comfort.
That left us with William. This had been my favourite of the list already. In fact, as a teenager, William Rhys was the top combo on my many "Baby Names" lists. I loved that it felt strong and gentle at the same time and had a timeless, friendly feel.
I was also struck by two coincidental sentiments attached to the name:
- William is made up of the elements willio "to wish, desire; be willing; be used to," and helm "helmet, protection, covering." This is often interpreted as "willing protector" which I love for its strong meaning. But, flip it around, and it could be considered as meaning "desiring protection". And for a boy who spent the first few weeks of his life in an incubator, that seemed very apt. In those early hours when we named him, it felt like this name was an evocation.
- William was also the name of my dad's father (he had died before I was born and he was always known as Nick) and also both of my dad's grandfathers so it is a name that has a lot of use in my paternal line.
So there we have it: William Brian Kenneth. Not a name that was destined to set the naming-world on fire, but one chosen with lots of love and sentiment and that he shares with three great-grandfathers. We call him William and Will equally but he already answers also to Bill, Billy, Billy-o, Bilbo, Wilhelm, William the Conqueror, Trespassers W / Trespassers Will (for any Winnie-the-Pooh fans), Mr Floofy Head, Milk Monster and Scrunchly Munchly to name a few.
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