08 Aug A Question Of Names

Victoria Steele and her husband have chosen a host of girls’ names – but their baby is a boy.

At 32 weeks pregnant, if anyone asked me what the hardest part about having a baby is, I’d know my answer. And it’s not the lumbering around like a baby elephant, or the heartburn, or even chasing around after a boisterous two-year-old. In fact, it’s not even the prospect of labour, although I seem to recall that was no picnic. No, the thing that’s making me break out in a cold sweat right now is the question of what name to give the baby.

You see, I remember from my first child’s birth that the first thing the midwife said (after exclaiming over the size of his feet, that is) was, “What’s his name?” That time, my husband and I were prepared with first and second names and had been decided on them for several months, so there was no dilemma over what to write on the little card for the front of the crib. But this time, I’m terrified we’ll have to say, ‘Umm, can you give us a few days? We haven’t made up our minds yet!’

The problem is this: at our 20-week scan, we learnt we were having another boy. This came as something of a shock to me, as I was convinced that this time we would have a little girl and be able to use one of the long list of girls’ names we weren’t able to use last time. However, I have been thwarted by that pesky Y chromosome, and now we have to come up with another boy’s name. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of my son having a little brother to play with, and I hope they’ll be the best of mates, but as far as choosing a moniker goes, it’s a tad inconvenient.

My older son is Oliver, a name we agreed on after a fair degree of wrangling, but there weren’t many backup names from which to choose. We seem to have less trouble conceiving girls’ names; however, it seems we’re better at conceiving boy babies. My husband’s surname is long and not particularly easy to spell so that rules out most long and complicated first names. Added to this is the fact that between our two families, our kids have six boy cousins, so their names, along with names taken by friends, form a forbidden list of no-go names. The social faux pas of stealing someone else’s child’s name is not one that’s easily forgiven. Plus, it makes us look pretty uninventive!

This being the 21st Century, I’ve even consulted that fount of all knowledge: the internet. You’d be amazed at the number of baby-naming sites you can find on there, from lists of the most popular names in various countries around the globe to sites that will generate a name for you based on a personality test. It seems a bit impersonal, though, doesn’t it: ‘Mummy, why did you call me Dwayne?’ ‘Because babynamer.com told us to, honey.’

The other day, a young shop assistant, after astutely observing that I was pregnant, asked me if I’d picked a name yet, and I had to admit I hadn’t. “Oh, I’ve picked my kids’ names already,” she said breezily, despite the fact that she didn’t plan to have children for another 10 years or so. “Charlotte for a girl and James for a boy.” I thought, but didn’t say, ‘That’s nice, but what if you have two of the same sex?’

I think that what makes the decision so tough is that it’s such a responsibility. You are giving a person something they will have to live with for the rest of their life (deed polls notwithstanding). It would be awful to mess it up by giving them the initials PIG or the name of some celebrity who was subsequently arrested for drug trafficking. I heard about one couple with the surname Murray who called their son Callum. Sounds okay at first, but let’s hope he never opens a seafood restaurant – ‘I’ll have the Callum Murray and chips, thanks’.

It’s not that we don’t have a list – we do, and it’s quite a long one. It’s just that I haven’t really fallen in love with any of the names on it yet. There always seems to be some niggling problem with each – too common, too unusual, too hard to spell, or too difficult to say with our last name. Or the worst one – I’ll suggest something that I think would be perfect, and my husband will say, “God no, I knew a kid at school called that, and he was a complete idiot!” You see, having two people who need to agree on a name doubles the degree of difficulty.

So I’m starting to think we might have to rely on the ‘wait till he comes out and see what he looks like’ method. We’ll take our list of names with us to the hospital and spend a few days getting to know this new little face before we make our decision. And if he has to be known as Baby X for the first few days of his life, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world. Mind you, if anyone has any suggestions…

Illustration by Shannon Melville