Why ever did my parents call me Jill? I have sometimes wondered. They must have wanted me to be an accountant. As a child I once wished I was Tanya, but in a typical Jill fashion, I was too timid to claim such an exciting name. I couldn’t imagine asking anyone to call me anything other than “Jill,” the subtle kiss of “Ji-” drawing back in on itself, the introverted “- il” finally settling on the salty-sour sides of the tongue in one simple syllable. I’m Jill, and the older, more stubborn and stuck in my ways that I get, the less the name feels like the wrong one.
Now, faced with the difficulty of naming my second child, I’m wondering if I will fall again to the paralysis that hit when trying to name the first. It was not the same lack of temerity that struck when I thought about changing my own name. I simply had never realised how many complications one encounters in this process of naming another human.
One major problem, for example, is that the list of disagreeable people I have known in my own life is already surprisingly long, and of course, no name on that list can be considered for my own flesh and blood. It would be like Harry Potter naming his kid Lord Voldemort.
Incidentally, one cannot name a child Lord. Nor Duke, Duchess, Queen or any other title that would indicate royalty. Not, I suppose, that anyone should want to.
There are many other rules like these, both legal and personal. In New Zealand, your child’s name may be rejected if it causes concern to the powers that be. You cannot name your child “Lucifer,” “Saint,” or “Mafia No Fear” (yes, someone did try).†
In the personal realm the rules are equally arbitrary. No name should conjure the image of a person, be it celebrity, fictional character, acquaintance, friend, or relative. A name that flaunts its style like a new pair of shoes should also be avoided, unless those are classic, simple shoes that could withstand the rise and fall of their era. We aren’t interested in gluing the name together from the odd bits of sea glass washed up on the beach; we’d rather find something unbroken – if not new, at least intact.
Whatever the outcome, we certainly must not steal a name from another racial group. No Māori names if you haven’t got Māori heritage. On the other hand, our Chinese, Fijian, Irish and Italian heritages are also suspect origins for names because neither of us speak any of these languages. Elio, the name of my oldest uncle, is not my partner’s favourite name for no better reason than this. A non-English name risks cultural appropriation or worse, mispronunciation.
A month after he was born, our first son was given a Chinese name by his great- grandmother, in addition to the name we’d chosen. This grandmother is the family’s strongest living tie to the China of a century past and one of the last people in the family who can fluently converse in the rural Cantonese of her homeland. The name is both a birthright and a blessing, the kind of inheritance that underscores the fragility of family which can break apart and disperse as easily as the seeds of a dandelion.
A name might be the most enduring connection to family that we will hopefully retain if we move to a new country or stop speaking our mother tongue – one small reason among many not to ask immigrants to don ‘easy’ English names. We are lucky to have these connections.
The feeling of gratitude at my son’s Chinese name sometimes snarls itself into a tangle of guilty grief. What did I forsake in choosing to raise my kids on this side of the planet, so far away from my own family?
The closest thing I have to such a legacy might be my Italian last name. For me, Varani evokes the photo of my grandparents on dad’s side which now occupies a space on the wall in dad’s guest bedroom in Colorado. His unsmiling parents stare in black and white disapprovingly out of an ornate round frame. The picture also has an unusual, hemispherical glass face which has the strange effect of making their faces appear as though they are looking in multiple directions, like the round glass eyes of a stuffed animal trophy.
My older siblings tell me that this stern couple visited from Minnesota when I was little, but I have no memory of it. When I was a child, this photo occupied a more prominent place in our homes, but I never questioned dad about it, and everything I think I know has been whispered down the chain of siblings like a family secret. They both died, I am told, of lung cancer, the result of a lifetime smoking. Having never known them, I hardly thought at all about what I’ve inherited from them. A penchant for distance, perhaps, and hopefully not cancer.
One of my sisters recently pointed out that, probably to dad’s disappointment, not one of his nine grandchildren bears his surname. The reason for this is that only one of his four sons has kids, and they go by their mum’s last name.
“Yet,” she said meaningfully, “not one grandchild yet.” After all, there are probably more grandchildren to come.
Oh well, don’t look at me. I’ve so far avoided the question of the surname by remaining unmarried. But the children! We certainly cannot hyphenate my partner’s already hyphenated surname, so the question is multiple choice: should they have his name, or mine? Or should I just end the dilemma, marry him and take his too? Possibly, the second child could have mine and the first his, but then does it seem as though one child is his and the other mine, as if we owned them? Considering the relationship of the surname to property, I suppose that may not be too far off the mark.
Sometimes I think of generations past who wore a certain surname and the women who appear on that family tree. New women come from other families and their names appear only once, like extras in a film. When women marry “out of the family”, their branches disappear into the margins, threatening to fall off the tree altogether. It is as if the mere fact of being a woman already forebodes a kind of rootlessness.
Woe, then, that this tiny new person will be welcomed with a burden of such personal and political significance as a name!
“Don’t stress, you have heaps of time,” people told us with the first child. Of course, it’s another one of those little white lies they tell pregnant women, along the same lines as “don’t eat soft cheese because you might hurt the baby”.
Perhaps there is some vague truth behind it – you aren’t required to name the child on the first day of his or her life – yet, when these same well-meaning people tell you that “reassuring” story of their neighbour’s friend’s baby who endured the name “Baby” for six months or so, until her parents could agree on something nicer, you realise that this name paralysis is not another symptom of pregnancy but may in fact outlast it by many months. So, you’d better hurry up and choose something.
Meanwhile, the child is assessed through an ultrasound. Many things are already known: there are ten fingers and ten toes, working kidneys, a beating heart flashing on the screen. Between scans the baby grows five centimetres. The records of a life start early; before we are named we are measured.
If only we could know the rest of the picture, we think, as if that would simplify the process of choosing the name.
One study tells us that we should shy away from “feminine” names for a girl, for fear that we will set her up to fail at the “masculine” careers, like math and science.‡ The conclusion is based on the proposition that a name arouses an expectation in other people – certain names suggest attractiveness, intelligence or kindness – and this expectation wears off on the bearer of the name and reinforces the stereotype. Isabella, by the researchers’ estimation, is simply not likely to be a mathematician.
Perhaps if I’d been Tanya at an early age, things would have been very different for me. But perhaps by the time I’d thought of Tanya, I’d already been too much of a Jill to make the leap. Anyway, after deciding that I could not face the possible amusement from family and peers should I change my name to Tanya, I never thought about Tanya again, and Jill embedded herself into my personality. I took on some aspects of Jill that we all know about – she’s sort of nerdy and in some ways reserved, she pretends to be smarter than she is.
Later on, I created an online profile on a dating website, just for fun. Don’t pretend you haven’t done it. I was, again in typical Jill fashion, too embarrassed to use my real name. I intellectualised it by pretending that it was a privacy issue. Anyway, I wasn’t really going to do anything; I just wanted to browse.
I chose the name Alice. Alice seemed a lot like Jill in many ways, and vanilla enough to match my personality. I was believably an Alice, glasses and all. Also, there’s a nice precedence for Alice. Alice in Wonderland, Go Ask Alice, Alice Thumb, A.L.I.C.E. Here was a little crowd of women I could fit into, all of them, incidentally, insane.
Unfortunately, the awkwardness of meeting a person and saying, “Well, my real name is actually Jill,” never wore off. Was it just me or were they disappointed, as if they’d discovered I was indeed an accountant? I imagine that they too had been impressed by the lovely sharp peak of the A, gently sloping into ‘liss’, an ‘s’ travelling along the tongue before arriving at the teeth, lips slightly parted. Oh no, don’t get too carried away. I’m really just Jill, which is much more sensible.
So, I closed the profile and filed Alice away. Some days though I still felt a bit more like Alice than like Jill, as if just by temporarily being Alice I had picked up some kind of Alice- related madness that would spread if I wasn’t careful.
These days, as my current pregnancy develops, I find myself fretting over names – fretting over the prospect that a name might orphan a child by overlooking one of his or her legacies, or might encumber a child with an unwanted personality trait.
Really, fretting. I can still hear my siblings joke, “Take a chill pill, Jill.”
Then I gave Mum an early draft of this essay to read and she said, “Oh, Jill was the name of a famous actress.”
Immediately my conception of the entire thing collapsed under the surprise of that announcement. I didn't even think to ask which actress. Of course, it doesn't matter, because I am not her. It’s not that I have something against actresses or even accountants for that matter, but that the expectation my parents had for a name like Jill was most likely very different from the one I’d imagined. The idea that somehow my personality had been propped up by the single staunch syllable of my name, that it had -- so close to “jail” – somehow contained me, was instantly disproven. I am Jill. I created her, that quiet, sour- salty, too smart, glasses-wearing, no frills, sensible introvert who frets over the smallest things.
But I shouldn’t get too carried away. Occasionally, Alice still pops in for a cuppa. She politely reminds me that perhaps I’ve always been a little bit unstable.
†Russell Blackstock, “No, you can't call your baby V8: Almost 500 rejected Kiwi name requests revealed,” The New Zealand Herald, January 1, 2017, http://www.nzherald.co.nz (accessed February 5, 2018).
‡Anushka Asthana, “Names really do make a difference,” The Observer, April 29, 2007,https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/apr/29/theobserversuknewspages.uknews (accessed February 5, 2018).