I love hearing about when other women are pregnant. I can be thrilled for them while not worrying about being a watermelon smuggler myself. (Yes, I did have a "watermelon smuggler" shirt that I used to wear while pregnant. Yes, it did get some rather odd looks from people who didn't quite get the joke.) What is a bit difficult for me to handle is biting my tongue every time I hear the names being bandied about for the wee ones.
Today, a friend of mine told me the potential names for her future grandchild. In and of themselves, the names were quite nice. They were common enough that most people would have heard of them, yet rare enough that not every kid on the block will respond to them. However, my initial thought on the girl's name was that my psycho roommate from college had the same name. (No, I am not exaggerating her level of craziness. She did things like drink vanilla extract to get drunk, slept in the closet or under her desk, slept over twenty hours a day, and one day took a knife to a number of items and just started stabbing. I got out of that living arrangement as quickly as possible.) My initial thought on the boy's name was that it was the same name as the misbehaving little hooligan who is in my eldest's class. Let me repeat: the names themselves are quite nice. Until meeting those two individuals, I would not have batted an eye about such names.
This led me on a rather wild train of thought, wondering how on earth people manage to find baby names that don't drive them batty. I remember really struggling to come up with a name for my first child, mostly because I ruled out a number of names because of students I had. Even the well-behaved students still had names that would ultimately remind me of them. Not only did we have to deal with my narrowing down the collection of possible names, but my husband also wanted to have a say in the matter. (I know...the nerve!) I might have liked the name "Viper," but he thought it reminded him of a kid who picked on him in middle school. We both initially liked "Radish," but then realized a friend's dog had the same name. Eventually, we settled on "Horse" for our firstborn, but that was influenced by not really knowing anyone else with the same name, except for a student I knew of, but did not have, by the name of "Horse-a-reeno." We figured the shortened version would work just fine.
Our other two kidlets were easier. "Rooster" was actually a gender-neutral nickname my husband had as a child, and that became our second daughter's name. "Pig Jr." was an abbreviation from a family name. (And please keep in mind this sounds sillier than it really is simply because of the Chinese zodiac animals I use to represent my offspring in this blog.)
A lot of names these days serve to remind me of others. Given that I had eighty or more students that I would interact with every year when I taught, that makes sense. Then there are the oodles of people in my own graduating class in school, those I knew from clubs and other activities, people from my various jobs before teaching, and then the zillions of people I have met since becoming a mother. So no matter what name someone suggests using for their own soon-to-be-born baby, I probably know someone with the same name.
What I really need to learn to do is just appreciate the names and not blather about the spoiled brat child, homicidal lunatic roommate, or otherwise delusional individuals who happen to have been named something that clearly is better suited for the adorable newborn-to-be. It's a good thing that babies have the chance to wipe the slate clean when it comes to certain names.
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