“Naming Our Child: The Search For Dignity Continues”
My wife and I have a nice division of labor in terms of her pregnancy.
She is responsible for conceiving our child, developing it through blastula, embryo and fetus stages, monitoring her overall health, blood pressure and blood sugar, getting regular checkups, handing 90-95% of the vomiting and going through the physical challenges of labor itself.
I was responsible for about two and a half minutes of effort at the very beginning of the process and am now responsible for coming up with names for the child, which my wife will then shoot down in flames (the name suggestions, hopefully not the child itself).
From the beginning, I’ve liked the name Hugo. It has always struck me as a more or less ideal name; no matter what a boy grows up to be, the name will suit him:
A bank president? Hugo.
An avant-garde performance artist? Hugo.
An insurance adjuster? Hugo.
A circus knife-thrower? Hugo.
See? They all fit.
Unfortunately, my wife has not seen it this way.
“Isn’t that the name of that cartoon duck with the diaper?” she asks.
“You’re thinking of Baby Huey,” I tell her.
“Whatever,” she replies. “Come up with something better.”
It is in an attempt to find a better name than Hugo that I bring the Big Fluffy Book of Baby Names (or something like that) with us out to dinner. We order our meal absentmindedly and I select likely names from the book, more or less at random. I submit them to my wife for approval, and she responds with everything from hostile glares to unenthusiastic shrugs.
Baby Name Fact #1:
Almost all cool names either involve wolves or spears in some way or sound like strippers. If we could find a name from some Scandinavian culture that means scantily clad wolf with a spear, we’d probably go with that, but it doesn’t seem to be listed anywhere in my book and I’m not going to hold my breath.
Neither is my wife, who shoots down each of my suggestions with an unnerving lack of hesitation. It is shortly after she has vetoed Bunny and Gypsy (good stripper names) that I become a bit peevish.
“You’re not being very open-minded,” I tell my wife.
“I am being open-minded,” she tells me. “You can tell I’m being open-minded because I haven’t leapt over the table and killed you yet.”
I almost offer her five dollars if she can leap anywhere, but think better of it. Unfortunately, I make some comment to the effect that it’s a good thing she’s not this close-minded all the time or the baby would never have been conceived in the first place. Equally unfortunately, I manage to say this at the exact moment of one of those odd silences that that sometimes fall over all the tables in a restaurant simultaneously.
Baby Name Fact #2:
It is completely impossible for most women to overhear a conversation about picking baby names without becoming hypnotized by it. I distinctly see a lady a couple of tables over smack her husband with a butter knife when he tries to talk to her while I am throwing out a particularly good set of names. My wife and I have obviously become something of a floor show to the women seated around us. The men with them look relieved not to have to make any conversation, so everyone is happy - except my wife who seems annoyed by something or other. Chalking this up to prenatal moodiness, I continue to toss out names.
We continue in this way through dinner, as I pay the check and as we make our way to the car. My wife, who has enough to worry about without subjecting herself to my driving takes the keys, so I have plenty of time to think as we go home.
I eventually reach a conclusion – it is up to me to come up with a good name, then really sell my wife on it. At this point, I’ve mentioned the name Hugo to hundreds of people without one positive response, so I have to accept that it is probably out of the running.
I decide to approach this problem systematically:
The first name should be two syllables long. My own name has always been a bit choppy and I like to blame it for my general lack of finesse and savoir faire in life. The first name should also be familiar to people and easy to remember. It should have a certain gravitas – perhaps an origin in British Aristocracy.
The middle name should also have two syllables, but it can be more whimsical. It should give our child something to admit to with a smile on a first date someday.
After sitting deep in thought for most of the way home, I come up with the perfect name.
The name I settle on is Sandwich Boing-Boing.
Think about it:
Sandwich. Who doesn’t like a sandwich?
The Earl of Sandwich? – impressive.
The Sandwich Islands? – popular.
Sandwich Fladd? – Sounds like a blues singer or a pool player: two things I’ve always wanted to be.
Boing-Boing? – Whimsical. Musical. Melodic, even.
I explain all this to my wife, who, understandably enough, will take a while to come around on this.
“Boing-Boing is not melodic,” she tells me. “It’s stupid.”
I try to sidestep this argument.
“Uh-oh,” I say. “All this time, we’ve been worried about my parenting skills, but our child isn’t even born yet and you’re the one calling him stupid. I’m very disappointed in you.”
After two and a half years of marriage, my wife knows better than to pulled into an argument like this. She makes a counter move to pull me off the topic:
“I’m not calling our child stupid,” she says, “and besides, how do you know it will be a he? What if she’s a girl?”
“Well, then,” I admit, “obviously, we’d have to find a different name. Sandwich Boing-Boing would be a silly name for a girl; it’s pretty masculine.”
Reflexively, my wife rolls her eyes so hard that she almost runs the car off the road. I decide that women like my wife are probably too emotional to make this kind of decision.
I feel momentarily gratified that little Sandwich Boing-Boing will have at least one rational parent.
Internet post-script: A week after this story originally ran in the Hippo, a friend of my wife's actually came up with a good female version of the name Sandwich Boing-Boing - Salad Ping-Ping.
