name game

A friend of mine recently posted about the whereabouts of her children's names. I liked this idea and thought I'd do something similar.


"And how are we feeling today?" the post-delivery nurse asked the morning after the birth of our first child. She peeked into the bassinet where, after a very wakeful night of feedings and diaper changes, our baby boy was sleeping peacefully. "Oh, he is precious. Congratulations," she said.

"Thank you," I managed to proudly beam despite the fact that my exhausted body ached.

After performing her routine blood pressure and temperature checks, she whipped out a folder brimming with the paperwork required to validate the existence of new life.

"Here are the applications for his birth certificate and his social security number," she said, handing me the forms. "Just fill them out and give them to the nurse on duty before you check out. Oh, and don't forget these," she said, dangling a blue pair of knit booties and a knit cap. "The volunteers downstairs like to make sure our newborns leave the hospital warm and cozy."

And with that she left the room, leaving my husband and I looking gravely at each other. The time had come to officially name our just-born baby.

"So, is he Garrett?" asked Blake, taking the paperwork off my lap.

I bit my lip.

"Or is he Owen?" he continued.

My jaw moved nervously back and forth and I started twiddling my fingers.

"Nathan? Forrest? Holden?" he went on. Suddenly the corners of his mouth turned up and his eyes smiled. "Linus?"

We had spent nine long months bouncing name ideas, both silly and serious, back and forth. Actually, the name game had begun long before our baby was even conceived. Naming our unborn children was a topic we liked to discuss while we were engaged. It was then that we picked out the name Garrett -- one of the few boy names we mutually liked. Garrett was a sturdy name, worked with the last name, and had the added familial benefit of being similar to Blake's father's name (Gary) and the same as one of my fantastic cousins. Plus, it worked well alongside the name Blake, which I adamantly requested serve as the middle name of our first-born son.

Though the name Garrett remained at the top of our list throughout the pregnancy, and especially so once we learned we'd be having a boy, we never used it to refer to our baby. Our baby was known simply as Baby. We wanted to use this time to play devil's advocate with ourselves, to look at all of the possibilities, before setting anything in stone. I wanted to be able to meet my baby boy, to look at his tiny, precious face, before officially deciding what he should be called. After all, naming a baby is no light task. It should be a name befitting both a child and an adult, it should be traditional as well as unique, it should fit in the family and, perhaps most importantly, it should fit the child himself.

I peeked into the bassinet where my son, less than a day old, lay quietly asleep. Did he look like a Garrett? An Owen? A Forrest? I couldn't be sure. He still just looked like a Baby.

"Well?" Blake asked again.

"Garrett?" I said, wincing.

"Does he look like a Garrett to you?" Blake asked.

"Maybe?" My eyes closed. "Yes?"

"Yes?" Blake said, looking for confirmation.

"Yes." I said again, trying my best to sound more resolute, but apparently not succeeding.

"Not Owen? You're sure?"

"Well, I was until you said that." I couldn't decide whether I'd find my reassurance from my husband or my baby, and my eyes twitched between the two. "What do you think, Blake?" I asked.

"You're the mother, this is your decision," he said, pleased he'd avoided the agonizing pressure I was currently being crushed under.

"Garrett," I said. "Garrett Blake. Write that on the forms. We'll name him Garrett Blake."

Blake did as he was told and suddenly our baby boy had a name.

In the days and weeks that followed, I tried to get used to a name other than Baby. I purposefully practiced calling him Garrett, but frequently found myself falling back into my pregnant habit of referring to him in a more neutral way. Calling him Garrett sounded so foreign and too official. I wasn't sure if I was convinced that we'd made the right decision. He looked to me as much like a Garrett as he did an Owen. This worried me, especially when, during her visit to play grandma that first week, my mother, with absolutely no malicious intent, said to me after scrutinizing his round baby face, "He could have just as easily been an Owen."

It wasn't until he was three months old that I really came to associate the name Garrett with the adorable baby boy I'd given birth to. I think moving to Brooklyn helped to solidify it in my head; Garrett pronounced with the drawn-out Brooklyn a definitely sounds more distinctly delightful than the way it was pronounced in Muncie. And now, nine months after he entered my life, he couldn't be anything else.