The Name

In my early teens I had become familiar with a church song entitled “Jesus, Name Above All Names”. This, and some other things I had learned, had caused me to believe that there could only ever be one person named Jesus. I thought the name had been allocated by God to the one and only Jesus and I could not imagine anyone having the temerity to take it and use it for their ordinary, human child.

 

I experienced, therefore, a moment of great upheaval in my knowledge and understanding of things one evening while watching the news with my father. I was sitting cosily on the lounge room floor in front of the gas heater and my father was sitting behind me in his arm chair with a cup of tea, when a story began about some war somewhere in the world. The scenes were familiar; a devastated town in an arid country with the reporter, conspicuously casual, standing to one side of the picture. He turned to the camera, introducing the scene. Then the story cut to a brief interview with a man important to the situation. He was the leader of the rebels. His hair was wild and his face dirty. He carried an automatic weapon slung carelessly over his shoulder and he spoke aggressively in his own language, gesturing and spitting as he made each point. Subtitles flashed up after each sentence but I wasn’t reading them. I had seen the name of the man printed in its little white box at the bottom of the screen. It had caught my eye because it was familiar in a flow of things beyond my comprehension. His first name was Jesus.

 

My immediate reaction was that they must have made a mistake, or that the man had given that name as a ridiculous alias, or someone at the television station was having a stupid joke. I turned to my father, my innocent eyes wide with indignation and shock.

“Why is that man’s name Jesus?” I demanded.

 

Without taking his eyes from the story my father answered tranquilly that it was a very common name in some countries, although sometimes it was pronounced differently. Before I could frame another question to this astonishing bit of information we were called in to dinner. I didn’t have an opportunity to pursue the matter and it eventually faded in importance but the question that bothered me then most of all was why didn’t God mind?

 

I am now pregnant with my third child and for the third time Mark and I have pored over our three baby name books. We have written lists, shortened them, scrapped them, and tried again. We have discussed, argued, and bargained. We have spent many nights lying in bed saying to each other “what about …?” Nearly a week ago we finally came to a decision; one boys’ name and one girls’ name. Mark was relieved. He still thinks the job has been done but I am about to tell him that I am not satisfied. I expect much the same reaction as I normally get when I act in this intensely feminine fashion. He will sigh, grumble, and shift in his seat. But because he is a good husband he will then pull himself together, assume an interested and patient expression and say “oh yes? What would you like to change?”

I find the job of choosing names for our children exhilarating and traumatic. The privilege of the process excites me. I trawl through baby name books and make endless lists which I then give to Mark to critique. He usually crosses most if not all of the names off, and sometimes I have to start again. But this too is exciting. I work with the few names that are left over from our collective preferences, discussing, pairing, and moving them around. I spend days turning them over in my mind; first one and then another. In the middle of a conversation on a completely unrelated topic I will suddenly ask “what do you think of …?” and Mark will be obliged to drop what he is doing and consider my question frankly. It doesn’t bother me if he turns my idea down. This is all part of the process, and the longer it is drawn out the more I enjoy it.

And the secrecy of it is all part of the fun. No one knows my ideas except Mark, and I will often savour a name for days before asking him what he thinks. I listen politely to other people but keep my own thoughts close. I will not have anyone else’s opinion. This is one decision Mark and I get to make completely on our own and I refuse to let anyone else be part of it. It is our child and we will choose its name. And it will live with our choice for the rest of its life, so I am meticulous. That is why the process is traumatic. For a name to be finally accepted I must be certain of its every aspect. It must sound right, spell easily, pronounce easily, and have a good meaning. It must have no bad associations, and the name must be unique to that child. I am even loathe to give my children the same initials as each other, or any other member of our immediate family. And all this must be done before the child is born. As soon as it appears in the world it will be named. It will never spend a week or two known simply as “It”, or “The Baby”. To me this is the ultimate indignity. These are my rules. And I know that everyone has rules.

Oh yes, I know. My mother-in-law has told me her rules. So have my mother, my father, and some other members of our family. According to them the name cannot be too weird, too common, or appear to be made up. It should not be able to be shortened. Girls must have feminine names, and boys must have masculine names. The names of all the children must match in popularity and tone. Initials too must be taken into consideration, and in both families there are names that are simply taboo. My aunt committed a serious error of judgement when she gave her daughter the middle name Mary because her sister’s husband had had an affair with a woman named Mary. My mother was forced to change my sister’s name by deed poll months after the birth because Nana was upset that my sister had been given a middle name from our father’s side of the family, as well as our father’s surname. And so it continues.

My family have a particular fascination with names, which I have inherited, to Mark’s amusement. His family are much more relaxed, particularly regarding surnames and historical connections. My father-in-law announced once at a wedding when he had had a few drinks that our surname is not actually Stewart. This was a matter of monumental importance to me. In much the same way as I sat in baffled silence after my epiphany in front of the television, I was speechless as Mark’s father told us how his father had immigrated to Australia from Scotland as John Joyce. Because John was a sensitive man, he struggled with the Australian sense of humour, particularly when his workmates on the docks joked about his feminine surname. So not long after his arrival John Joyce changed his name to Jack Stewart. He then married and had four children, all of whom were given the revised cognomen. This information, delivered in an off hand fashion from the other side of a large table in a dimly lit room excited and appalled me. I longed to question Mark’s father more closely about it but he had moved on to an energetic tirade about the incompetence of the government, and the moment was lost.

I grilled Mark on the way home that night, but he was as unmoved as my father had been all those years ago.

“Well,” I demanded, “is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“What your father said. Tonight. Weren’t you listening?”

“Oh that. I don’t know. I suppose it is if he said it.”

“Don’t you care?”

“Not really.”

“But we’re not who we thought we were.”

“Yes we are. We’re Stewarts.”

“But we’re not. If we went back and tried to trace our family history we wouldn’t find anything because we’re not Stewarts.”

“Well now you know, you can look under Joyce can’t you.”

“But Stewart is Scottish and Joyce is Irish,” I wailed, “I thought I married a Scot, but I married an Irishman.”

“No you didn’t,” Mark said maddeningly, “you married an Australian.”

I lapsed into frustrated silence. I knew Mark was quietly laughing at me, and he confirmed it when he said lightly “at least you know you didn’t marry your cousin.”

This little jab had its origin in my family history. All of my mother’s family from the time of settlement are buried at one particular small cemetery and we used to meet there for family picnics when I was a child. We would sit on our ancestors’ graves eating sandwiches and drinking tea and listening to Nana and my great aunts telling stories. They would tell us about my great great grandfather who had a hill named after him because he was killed there riding a wild horse for a bet, and Nana’s cousin who, after her husband had died, would climb into the bedroom windows of single men, looking for love. These stories fired my imagination, and when I found that there were several Stewarts buried amongst my ancestors as well, I surmised that perhaps I had married a distant cousin. This thought only added to the romance of my family history but my father-in-law’s revelation upset these pleasant ideas.

Since then such things have faded in importance as Mark and I make our own family, shaping a history that now seems mundane but may one day be fascinating to our descendents. In creating an identity for our children to live by, their personal names have grown in importance. A name describes a person in a way that nothing else can. It is what others call you, and it is what you call yourself. On the scale of first impressions, name and appearance vie for top spot. But while appearance is shaped by personality, age, and genetics, a name is chosen before any other thing is known about the child. And the child has no say in this decision, though it will affect it for the rest of its life. This, again, is why the process is traumatic.

We have all moaned in sympathy upon hearing some awful name for a new baby because we feel and know what that child will suffer when it goes out into the world under a name that will encourage surprise or derision. I have often joked that I have forgiven my mother for everything but cannot forgive her for her moment of madness when she gave me Prentice as my middle name. I cringe every time I am required to write it, and when people ask me what my middle name is I try to avoid telling them. Although I have won money by betting that no one can guess my middle name, I am now strongly opposed to the use of surnames as Christian names. Because that is what my name is. It is an old family name imposed upon me because of someone else’s happy associations. It has no depth or meaning for me. It is an interesting relic like a broken piece of crockery, or a rusted set of shears. Perhaps this is why I have an obsession with meaning and associations. In my search for the perfect name for my child I have often rejected a name that had a poor meaning, or a weak one. I want my child to be able to say with pride “my name means …”

That is why I was particularly horrified when friends of ours announced that they had called their first child, a son, Hezekiah. Swallowing my initial shock, I asked hopefully what the name meant.

“I don’t know,” the father told me. “Hezekiah was a king in the bible. He was a good king, I think.”

To me this was a flimsy reason indeed to burden a child with a name that he could easily come to loathe or regret. I notice that the next two children in this family, both girls, have been given pleasant ordinary names, and I feel even more sorry for little Hezekiah.

But, as for me, I am safe in the knowledge that I have not committed such crimes against my children. Unfortunately I cannot claim that this is all my doing. My girls have Mark to thank because when it comes to baby names he is more moderate and careful than me and has managed so far to temper any idealistic notions I may have had. So my two daughters’ names mean respectively Life and Beautiful, and their middle names have equally pleasant and feminine meanings. But the identity of our third child still hangs in the balance. And now I begin to understand why the parents of that man standing filthy and indignant in the ruins of his native town chose at his birth to give him the name of the Son of God.