Babyhood (9780062098788) (6 page)

I couldn't believe how many ways there are for a baby to be strapped in, buckled up, fenced in, suspended, cradled, swung, hung, couched, supported, contorted, and held. But after enough time in the store, I figured out what it's all about; I isolated the simple premise on which this huge child-care/child-maintenance industry is based: The Baby's Buttocks. Everything they make is designed specifically to, in one way or another, accommodate the Butt of a Baby. You're either resting it, holding it, shaking it, cleaning it, or transporting it. Think about it: high chairs, baby baths, bassinets, playpens—all essentially different places to temporarily park your baby's rump. Johnny Jumpers, bouncy chairs, swingomatics, exersaucers—different ways to move it around. Changing tables, diapers, diaper covers, diaper genies, diaper hampers, diaper wipes—I think we know where the main focus of concern is here. And, of course, the plethora of car seats, strollers, backpacks, snugglies, infant carriers—all just trying to help you get your baby's ass from Here to There without ever touching the ground.

O
nce you go ahead and buy every piece of merchandise with the word “baby” in the name, you still have another problem: How do you get all this stuff home? The answer, of course: Get rid of your car and find yourself a big ugly four-wheel-drive/trucky/sport utility/“just-throw- everything-in-the-back” vehicle. Suddenly you understand those behemoth station wagons your parents had. But because we are, as a group, so very much more clever, we now surround ourselves instead in hulking
tanks
—uglier by far than anything we sat in the back of when we were five. But this time they have much
cooler names.
Names reeking of adventure: Explorer, Expedition, Outback, Range Rover, Land Cruiser, Four Runner, Trooper, Pathfinder . . . Where do we think we're going? We're picking up diapers and dropping off a video. We're not bagging a cheetah and lugging it across Kenya.

And when you outgrow
these
cars, you next find yourself in a
mini-van,
the last stop down on the “I used to be cooler than this” slide. Because in a jeep, you can at least still
pretend
to be cool. When you're at a stoplight and an attractive woman pulls up alongside you, you can still smile and convince yourself, “Maybe she thinks I'm enormously rugged, and the car is loaded up with equipment for that very dangerous geological expedition.”

But in a
mini-van
, you're fooling no one. You're on your way to Gymboree, the side compartments are stuffed with diaper wipes, and the interior is all sticky with apple juice.

You know what? You're not Indiana Jones; you're a dad.

And Thy Name
Shall Be . . . Something

N
aming your child is a monumental responsibility. You get to tag and identify—for life—a whole new person. Throughout your child's life, it will come up every hour of every day.

“Name, please.”

“Hi, what's your name?”

“Sorry, I didn't catch your name.”

“We just need you to sign your name.”

“Would you put last name first, first name last, middle initial . . .”

“May I ask who's calling?”

“Name and Social Security number . . .”

“Honey, guess who's on the phone?”

“You know who we haven't heard from in a while?”

“And the
name
of the deceased . . . ?”

And with every usage, that name—the result of hours and hours of debate, and the consideration of an infinite number of variables, uninvited input, and conflicting personal agendas—that name will, for good or bad, represent to the world and its people, for all eternity, your child.

Which is why you don't want to screw it up.

P
eople screw up their kids' names all the time. Not on purpose. In fact, usually with the best of intentions. The new parents who want their child to stand out and be recognized, who want more than anything to thrust their child forward from the sea of common and interchangeable surnames, are the ones responsible for kindergartens full of Zebadiahs, Queequegs, and Moons. Lovely and creative names all. Unfortunately, these kids are in for a lifetime of quizzical stares, judgmental smirks, and patronizing displays of phony interest, in response to which they can only say, “Yeah, my parents were into a thing . . .”

The power is extraordinary. The simple combination of letters and sounds
you select
can result in a life of carefree coolness or decades of expensive therapy.

“Hi, I'm Jake” versus “Hi, I'm . . . Tapioca.”

Not to denigrate the virtues of being unique. It's just that there's a fine line between Good Unique and Just Plain Wrong. Good Unique is when you call your child's name and he's the only one who comes running. Just Plain Wrong is when they're running because they're being chased.

I imagine that part of the reason there are so many Bobs and Janes year after year is that even parents who
want
to be creative ultimately chicken out. And understandably. You never know when the name you love today is going to be hideous tomorrow. The Ashleys, Dylans, and Maxes of our children could turn out to be what Hortense, Gertrude, and, frankly, Max were when
we
were growing up. It's sort of like the jacket you wore in your high school yearbook photo; it may have been cutting-edge that week, but for the rest of your life, you're “the maroon-plaid-jacket guy with lapels the size of sea flags.”

P
rior to this child, the only comparable experience we had was naming our dog—which is undeniably less complicated. There's no family lineage to protect, no concern for how it sounds followed by your last name . . . The only real question is, “How does it sound yelled across a park?”

Some pets, sadly, wind up never getting named at all. Who doesn't know a cat named Kitty or a dog named Dawg?

And if you can't come up with a great name deserving of their species, it's certainly acceptable to give your pet a People's Name. But rarely the reverse.

“Are you coming to Scruffy's piano recital? Oh, you really should . . . you know,
Snowball's
going to play the trombone.”

You almost never hear that.

But when choosing a name for your child, there's a lot more at stake. The name-er can influence profoundly the life of the name-ee. Of course, it's hard to determine what's “nature” and what's “nurture”; does somebody turn out as they do
because
of their name, or do they
get
the name that's appropriate for the life they were on their way to living anyway? Hard to say. All I know is that if you name your daughter Trixie or Tina, she's more likely to sleep in a van with a band from Seattle than the exact same girl named Ruth. Similarly, a boy named Herbert
may
grow up to play baseball professionally, but not as easily as Dale, Pee Wee, or Scooter. This, of course, is not scientifically documented or anything, but . . . I think I know what I'm talking about.

A lot of people tell you that their kid popped into the world and the name just
revealed itself.

“He looks like an ‘Elliot.' Let's call him ‘Elliot.' ”

Come on—
nobody
seven minutes old looks like “Elliot.” It takes
years
to look like “Elliot.” (And interestingly enough, slightly less for “Neil” and “Howard.”)

If they're like most newborns, your precious new one will enter this world looking like one of three things: Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, or a boiled chicken. That's basically it. (It
is
possible for a baby to look like Churchill or Gandhi
and
a boiled chicken, but this usually goes away with time and plenty of fluids.)

In some cultures they don't even name their babies right away. They wait until they see how the child develops; see what they do, see how they behave . . . and then name the kid accordingly. Like in
Dances with Wolves.
If you stand with your fists clenched, you're called Stands with a Fist. I like that system. It certainly makes it easy to remember people you've met.

“How's that guy doing?”

“What guy?”

“You know . . .
what's-his-name,
the guy who's always yelling at the vegetables . . .”

“Oh, you mean Barks at Salad?”

“Yes, yes, Barks at Salad . . . how's
he
doing? . . .”

Unfortunately, in
our
world, kids' names would be less romantic and poetic. Certainly less
warrior-like.

“This is my oldest boy, Falls Off His Tricycle, his friend, Dribbles His Juice, and my beautiful daughter, Allergic to Nuts.”

We bought every book out there on baby names, because when you're not by nature good with decisions, what could be more pleasant than slogging through the list of every name registered in every town on the globe? While it is nice to learn about other peoples, I'm not sure that any one family needs
that
many choices. You're probably going to stay within a given range. Very few people end up deciding, “Okay, so, Achmanzlebred if it's a girl, and if it's a boy—Scott.”

You do, however, get to learn the etymology and origin of names, which is useful for parents trying to boost the self-esteem of kids stuck with
loser
names.

“Sweetheart, you know Milton
actually
means ‘Ferocious Fighter of Freedom' . . .”

T
here was a period where our child's birth was getting really close, and we still had nothing. We were dangerously close to calling him Untitled Baby Project. The discussions intensified.

“You really don't like Penelope?”

“Really don't.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I just . . .”

“Come on . . .
Penny.
You like the name Penny, don't you?”

“I guess . . .”

“Sure you do . . . Penny
Marshall
, Penny
Lane
. . . Penny for Your
Thoughts
. . .”

“I don't have anything against Penny . . .”

“So? Penelope
is
Penny. It's the same thing.”

“You
say
it's the same thing, but it's
not
. . . If it was so much the same thing, why would you have to shorten it? You're obviously dressing it up to try and sell it to me. Like, what—if you say Penny enough times, I'm going to forget the ‘el-o-pee' is there? I still know it's there.”

Certain names you eliminate not because there's anything wrong with the name, it just has a bad personal history.

“What's the matter with Merrill again?”

“That girl Merrill I knew in high school who ate egg salad through a straw.”

“Oh, right . . . so we're crossing out Merrill.”

“Please.”

And some names you can
both
eliminate pretty comfortably.

“Adolf?”

“Out.”

“Medusa?”

“Out.”

“Tweety?”

“Let's talk about it for a second.”

You see, some names may
sound
silly but prove to be advantageous in the real world. For example, the not-particularly-common-but-not-unheard-of Bumpy.

Now unless you're raising a Disney cartoon, you're probably not going to name your child Bumpy. It's silly, childish, and laughable. But isn't “laughable” potentially
good?
For example, how could anyone say no to a person named Bumpy? Think about it: You just got home, you had a terrible day, you don't want to see anybody, talk to anybody, think about anybody . . . The doorbell rings.

“Ah, geez . . .
Who is it?
”

“It's
me
—Bumpy.”

Beat.

“Okay, come on in.”

You're going to let the guy in.

“I hope you're by yourself.”

“Well, I brought my cousin,
Blinky.
”

“Ohhh . . . all right, both of you, come on in . . . but only for a little while.”

S
ome people don't agonize at all about finding the perfect name. They simply give the kid
their
name.

“He'll be
me
, but Me
Junior.
To be followed by Me the Third, and
his
son, Me the Fourth.”

Certainly moves things along. Of course, if you're
really
pressed for time, do what heavyweight champ George Foreman did—name all of his kids George Foreman. God bless him, a great fighter, a fine humanitarian—not, apparently, the most creative in the naming department. An entire family named George Foreman. It's not like they're of successive generations, overlapping only here and there for a few years . . . No, this is almost half a dozen guys, with the exact same name, all living in the same house.

“This is my son George Foreman, his younger brother George Foreman . . . this one here is five and a half, say hello to George Foreman, and the little ones . . . where are they? . . . George Foreman? George Foreman? Come over here . . . okay, now, say hello, this is George Foreman and George Foreman . . . Why don't you all sit down on the couch over there—the couch, interestingly enough, I call George Foreman.”

For others, the task of naming is simplified by family mandates. There are people to be honored and remembered.

“The child will be named after his grandfather.” Or, “She will take her mother's surname, and it shall be as her own . . . And they shall go forth unto themselves, with their beasts and their grains, and into the desert shall they sojourn.” (I'm sorry, I just saw
The Ten Commandments
on TV and frankly, I enjoy talking like that.)