Names

I wanted the perfect name for my child. If the baby had been a girl, I wanted to name her after my grandmother. That would have been too easy though.

When we found out the baby was going to be a boy, I started thinking long and hard. I wanted something a little different, not too common, but not so crazy that he'd be embarrassed in years to come.

Nemo and I talked about it a lot. That is, I talked, and he listened. He was mostly uninterested. Every time I tried to have a serious conversation with him, he would come up with names like "Lightning" and "Thunder". I would ask him to be serious, and he would say that he wasn't joking. I would get mad at him and drop the subject for another day. But the same thing would happen the next time too. I was so frustrated.

I brought up the idea of having a Junior. It wasn't really what I wanted, but at that point I wanted to involve Nemo and make him feel like he was part of this baby's life. Personally, I think it's too confusing to have two people with the same name in one household. So I was relieved that Nemo didn't want the baby to be a junior either. But his words hurt me to the core. He actually said to me - I might have a baby of my own and I'd like to save it for him. Didn't he understand that this was his baby? I was devastated.

Since I didn't have Nemo's input, (and I wasn't even sure he was going to show up for the birth) I had a name picked out as my back-up. But at the time, I thought I loved Nemo and I wanted the name to be chosen by both of us.

At 38 weeks, I was sent to the birthing center because I was starting to develop pre-eclampsia. On the way there, I called Nemo at work and said - we need to choose a name today. I was panicking. I could have had the baby that day and he wouldn't have had a name. The hospital ended up releasing me.

I went home and consulted the social security website. I put together a list of five names and we narrowed it down to one we could both agree on. I had one week to toss it around in my head before I delivered, and I ended up being pretty happy with it.

That leaves Lightning and Thunder still available for Nemo's next child.