For about four years now my wife has been pestering me about children's names. I no longer have a reason not to enter these discussions. With those magic pee sticks telling me that I'm going to be a father it is time to enter the world of picking a name for our future child. God help me.
My wife has very clear ideas about names. Unfortunately, our ideas differ. Even worse, for me, is that she's got a good four years headstart on me, so I am going to be forever playing catch up. Until this stage I have been able to say "no, I don't like it" to most any name she presented that she had heard and liked. I no longer have that opt out, it's time to step up, be a man and play my part.
Names are so important. I'm of the belief that they should mean something; they should be more than a verbal tag that you identify your child with. My wife likes ones that 'sound right'. Her favourites basically match the top names list. She wants to make sure they have something that ends in, or can be abbreviated to end in, an 'ee' sound. I think we should ensure they cannot be abbreviated into something that will lead to my child being mocked growing up. I get the distinct impression that this might be a futile undertaking, however, as nobody can match the twisted brilliance of children for warping names into something that can inflict damage on a person. How can I protect my child from the hundreds of devilishly fiendish minds they will face in their path to adulthood?
The simple answer is, of course, I cannot. So from the offset it is about damage limitation. Part of me would like to wait until the child arrives, in the hope that it will arrive with a name tag sewn in somewhere. However, the other part of me is terrified that nothing will be immediately obvious, and our child won't have an identity for the first few days of his or her life.
Anyway, I've probably spent enough time writing this - I've got over 120 000 000 websites to trawl through to find the perfect name.
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