Thy name is mother
Telling people you don’t like their child’s name is just not on — however, Herself never got this memo. With my firstborn, she openly opposed his name. She would say: “So . . . are we sticking with Rufus?” Two years later: Yes, we are indeed ‘sticking’; he’s two years old, for eff ’s sake; he knows his own name and might be rightly weirded out if we changed it now.
She has a way of introducing him to people — “This is . . . Rufus?” — that seems to say “I know, I know, I can barely believe his name is Rufus either, but whaddya gonna do?”
She finally, grudgingly accepted that we would not be renaming our son at her behest, when the second one was conceived. “What are we going to call this one?” she’d pipe up at dinner. Oh yes, we would be deciding this child’s name by committee, it seemed.
“How about Tom?” I’d suggest hopefully. “Ugh, no way. Let’s do Bowie,” Himself would return. “Don’t be mad; you can’t name a child Bowie,” Herself would interject. “He’d be bullied at school. I think Ambrose is lovely.” A pattern soon emerged. I would posit a reasonably nice, ordinary name. Himself would dismiss it for being too boring and suggest something worthy of a Paltrow child, and then Herself would take over and go full Frank Zappa on it.
It’s incredible I got off so lightly with my name, as my mother’s top choices for Bump the Sequel were, in no particular order: Hadley, Aeneas, Milo and Bae. This last one was particularly troubling as I couldn’t seem to make her understand that ‘bae’ was now an actual word.
When the baby arrived, he remained nameless for several days as we batted suggestions back and forth. Herself vetoed every single suggestion, and frankly, it started to wear me down, so much so that eventually I resolved to just let Herself get on with naming ‘our’ baby.
I decided that even if her next suggestion was Hannibal (a distinct possibility with her), I was going to go with it. And you know what? I loved her next proposition. Fantastic; child named, job done. So, natch, a few weeks in, Herself began making mutterings of the “Are we sure about the name Arlo?” variety. Oh hell, no. “You are not reneging on the name, after I gave you the honour of naming my son,” I railed.
With the seeds of doubt sown, I, too, began to question the name. As the weeks passed, however, one person really got behind it: my firstborn was proudly introducing his new brother to everyone. If I was to change the name at this stage, it could scar the child for life. “What happened to the other baby?” he would wonder forever. “What did they do with baby Arlo? Who is this imposter baby?”
No, we were ‘sticking’ with Arlo. Names are important. For example, when I tell Himself we’re having kale pesto on our fish, he refuses to eat it on principle, but if I say we’re having pesto of undisclosed origin, he’s on board!