Experiment in the Essay #10 & 11: Naming The Baby-- #52essays2017

Have you picked out a name yet? They would ask constantly, the meddlesome Greek Chorus, A Concerned Citizens Brigade, gesturing at my big-big-big belly.  A pregnant belly is a marquee with the lights blown out. What are your top picks?

To function according to their literary trope, a Greek Chorus must consist of no one identifiable in particular.  So "they" means, suitably, almost anyone, or everyone. I'm a writer, and pronoun vagueness affronts my sensibility.  But, still-- it seemed like the most socially acceptable prying question anyone had, and everyone expected an answer to. The deli clerk. The UPS guy. My friend's auntie. The hair stylist. You.

I perfected a kind of beatific, Mother-Mary smile to beam at them, like I was trying to remember exactly what sex with God had been like, a bit distracted from the pedestrian world and its nominations.  The kind of smile that is holy-but-weird enough that the original question gets deflected.  So that when I said eventually, "We don't have one yet, for a boy, if it's a boy...." it didn't even sound all that bad or bothersome.

Meanwhile, hormones collided in my bloodstream like poorly steered go-carts on a racetrack.  A million bitchy replies thankfully didn't make it past the blood brain barrier, and so, praise Mother Mary in her immaculacy, didn't come out of my mouth. Only an idiot curses at a Greek Chorus: the person you are really annoyed at is yourself.  Like a good Chorus, these interrogators just expose your psyche for what it is.

A hot mess, soupy with nouns. 

But then someone you like or love asks the same question.  And, it gouges deeper. Even fond memories of the sex you never had with god can't distract you from your own inability to answer: Have you picked out a name yet? 

I wanted to be a landline giving off a dial tone-- but, no.

A name is deeply personal, almost embarrassing in the formative stages-- for you to ask me about a name-- whether I have one picked or not, or what it is-- is like me asking you if my embryo is cute, which it is not. Holding out the prints from the ultrasound, look! The big-headed vaguely-toed, curled bean of a thing is not even a distant cousin of cute.  Maybe just a bit beautiful because, hey, even a cockroach-- periplanata Americana, a product of global trading-- is beautiful, if you consider it the craft of natural selection. But this embryo?  Let's keep it to descriptive, non-subjective, clinical language. It's only cute to the parent-to-be because they know it's theirs, and they can't believe it.

But since you're cornered by the rhetorical question, the only answer you can give is, Yes, that's a gorgeous bit of whatever in your uterus! Why don't you put it on Facebook and crowd-source your joy! People will give you some OMG's and virtual cigars and congratulatory specialness will abound until they scroll down and forget your gray blur. 

Also, I actually don't want to know what you think.

If I tell you the name I've picked-- if I, in fact, have one-- maybe you'll wince.  Or start to opine and riff on all the problems; "But did you think about the fact that Jumilla rhymes with Gorilla?" or "Isn't Azalea a flower, and did you think about the fact that the baby will have to LIVE WITH THAT NAME FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE?" Someone actually said that-- maybe my father?-- about one of our names. 

Anyway, it wasn't the girls' names that were the issue; it was boys, damn them to a one.  I'd suspected the patriarchy was stupid, and now I was sure. If I had a son, he'd have to be given a girl's name: Jasmine, because I could only think as far as my preferred tea, right?  

Maybe the Chorus-Master, who was known to thumb aggressively through a rolodex shoved deep into her robe pocket, had tried to offer commentary on my pick using all caps: DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE FACT? She meant well, trying to shift the action in the direction of safe choices.

Please, sirs, madams: I am doing my very best not to think. 

Every name rhymes with something, is one problem.  And people aren't practiced at the art of authentic deference, is another. 

I developed a belief, and talked about it: No one should be allowed to preview the names of the not-yet-born.  Because all names trigger memories, associations.  Like every plant in the forest is connected in mutual exchange of gas and nutrients, every name communes with bigger meanings. And unlike any plant in the forest, it stands naked and alone at recess in the school yard, its balls shriveling in the wind. 

I never felt more or less like a writer; sitting there staring at the blank page of my not-yet-born little person, and coming up with nothing suitable. The absence of a name burned a hole.  It left a black mark on my decisiveness as a fallen cigarette leaves a scar in a couch.  I turned that feeling perniciously inward: I felt as glaringly deficient as I was pregnant for my lack of YES when it came to basically any boy's name ever. 

I prayed a bit, for clarity, for revelation of Just Right. I don't normally do this, and if I'm quite sure Mother Mary and the rest know an opportunist when they see one. The results were sparse. And I couldn't take it up with the Greek Chorus directly: they are unbudging and ungenerous when the main character is in crisis.  Their role is not to offer sympathy, or empathy.  They are the filler around the pathos. 

A name, once given, also burns a hole in your sense of being singular. There were five Sara/h's in my high school class alone. And my husband's name, John, is the generic name for a man, it means, essentially, "everyman": "Any old John." Your name unites you, if casually, with every other human who has ever been given that name, and felt special, and not been. 

And so we could not pick.  For a boy, that is. Every noun was a misfit. 

The blank stayed blank.  And as we got closer and closer to birth, a weird inevitability of pregnancy, the blank grew bigger, and more fierce, until it terrorized me the way driving blinding rain on an interstate is terrifying.  Griping the wheel, your reaction time compromised by your clenched muscles, you can feel the whoosh of barreling trucks, hazards blinking, on either side of you. If I can take this metaphor way too far--this  was the sense that everyone else alive had a name and it was fine, all the other expectant parents gladly previewed you their "Kai" (we already had one, stepson #1), "Quin" (We already had one, stepson #2), Caleb, Aidan (Which I still like, but it was too popular, it was even the name of a popular book on selecting a name, "Getting Beyond Ada and Aidan"), Myles, Miles, and the list doesn't end. 

And since you asked: the name could not rhyme with Kai or Quin or be a conglomerate of those names, hence many we liked well enough got nixed early.  We were wary of being too Dr Seuss-y when introducing ourselves as a family: "Hi, meet my sons Kai, Quin and Cian, who is basically my first two sons squished together." It just reeked of coyness and lack of imagination, attachment to certain sounds. 

My stepsons liked Phoenix, and other badass mythological names. But somehow-- 

We gave up on all of them, one by one: River, Sticks, Styx, Branch, Root, Sky, Skye, Titan (are you judging us yet? Do you trust me on that one?) and, fuck it, Matthew, Matteo. 

John and I would lie in bed at night before sleep (his, not mine, I was the watch-guard for nouns) and in the mornings after sleep (his, not mine, I was there with a sweet and savory casserole to greet dawn for all her hard work of arrival, hoping she'd show up with a plus one: a name) and pull up naming websites on our phones. Insomniacs and everyone else should not have phones in bed, but there is nothing like pretending to relax while you are deeply stressed.  

There are, literally, hundreds of naming websites, each with hundreds of lists reflecting the agony of (unnatural) selection. 

I became familiar with them all, like you'd become familiar with your lover's tics. We'd devour etymology, historical information, cultural beliefs. But none of the names stuck on our lips, none had the traction, the click, the absolute fit of my mouth with my husband's-- that is, the convincing connection of a good kiss. 

For fun, we explored the lists themselves. We read off names popular in the 1890's, 1910's, 1930's, in the US and elsewhere, dim elsewheres vaguely related to my husband's or my ethnic backgrounds: Mexican, A little Native American a few generations removed, Polish, Russian, Irish, French Canadian, whatever that was ...it seemed endless, like an intestine miles long pulled from a sacrificial animal. 

We'd read them to ourselves, then aloud, where they floated in the air like blimps; we'd turn over each name on our tongue, hear each other again, lapse into silence. It became like a poem, like mantra, sounds for their own sake.  I was embarrassed and involved. 

Making a person, naming a person, is a tremendous responsibility.  I have always had trouble titling my poems, titling my essays, even coming up with passwords.  The title says too much while never being enough. 

This inability to nominate made my heart palpitate, my armpits sweat, met with big frowns from the Greek Chorus-- watch out, as they say to kids on the school yard, your face could get stuck like that. A furrow line like a comma separated the halves of my forehead.  We'd leave the question alone for months or weeks-- what if it was a girl?  We had girls names we liked.  What if all this time spent searching was for naught?  But like blisters arise only from certain shoes, the name quandary would bubble and chafe as we tried to take steps in the direction of finality.

Another casserole baked for dawn, when never in my life had I made a real casserole.  Dawn was always grateful, and always the same, promising false hope, shreds of pink and blue in her jogging suit.   

Our narcissism made us sick-- there were real problems in the world to think about; but at the same time, the way the name kept eluding us was dispiriting.  There is no child ever, as far as I know, that was unnamed. That might set ours apart.  In some cultures, they don't name bastard children-- or the parent must claim the child by doing so.  In other cultures, your community picks for you, and you hardly get a vote. 

DO YOU HAVE A NAME PICKED OUT WHAT IS IT?  The Greek Chorus asked with intensity like when people stop being able to hear each other over cell phones and so speak louder, and we shrugged. DID YOU THINK ABOUT HOW CIAN HOW LUCA HOW PAOLO HOW HOW HOW....

Even a Greek Chorus tackling me wouldn't pull out that fucking noun, if I had it to share. Even if they used forceps, or the "last bit of toothpaste" method, or water torture.

As is a trope for me, I used my insomnia well. It was too easy, the way sleep was too hard, to think of quips dismissing other people's inappropriate imbecility when I was feeling so sour, like I was no longer made of cells, but only of blinks.  The baby rolled over in the belly while my mind rolled over possible dismissive replies: We don't believe in names. My husband and I have decided names are for losers.  

I was going to save that cathartic crisis for the maternity ward if you don't mind. Plus, every single boys name is fucked and awful.

Do you want to know the flavor of my anxiety attack when at three days old my son-- we had a son, we did!-- still was not named? At one week?

Because, yes: Baby arrived.  Baby was a boy. 

We had called him/her/it/pronoun-less one "Nugget" in the womb. That stuck and as far as I was concerned that was it.  Little Nugget, I would say, as I held the tiny creature that was my nameless son. The NICU's plastic armchair-- blue-- wheezed when you sat down in it to cradle the baby; I listened to my husband, hovering in his blue smock that only he could look sexy in, as he read off yet more names from his phone for the billionth time, and then from the whittled down list.  I shook my head endlessly, my No so acute it might become the baby's moniker. And I could live with that.  We'd explain it as a shortened version of my surname-- Nolan. It was almost workable. 

Are you real before you have a name?

"My little person," apparently, is not satisfying enough, nor enduring. The devil is thwarted when hoping to tempt you, as we are all tempted at times, to go down an uglier path than we like to admit we're walking. 

In the NICU, we found that we were not alone in feeling bereft, and without intercession from God. There was an orthodox Jewish couple hanging around the incubator next to us. They had a little girl who also lolly-gagged nameless, getting her diaper changed, being given bottles held upright by the huge hands of the huge NICU nurse, the gentlest and largest man I'd ever seen. 

"Baby Nolan" our tag read. They identified baby with mom for the hospital stay. I liked that. I fended off the patriarchy (my husband's name, Gonzalez) with the patriarchy (my father's name, Nolan). It made no sense. 

But for one feeding time, I zombie-walked into the NICU, having scrubbed myself free of contaminants with their harsh pink soap, and they had rearranged the babies.  Moved so and so to this incubator, so and so to that.  My son was now in the stabler cohort, because obviously the only thing wrong with him at this point was that he had no name, and his mom was possibly deranged from lack of sleep.  A new nurse was on shift; she asked the baby's name. I said "Gonzalez."  She disappeared, and returned, looking confused and distraught, with no baby and no instructions. "Are you sure?" She asked.  

I'm sure. NOT, I AM NOT FUCKING SURE, I MEANT BABY NOLAN.

Thank god they had the hospital tags on my wrist. You cannot just walk in there and lie about your baby.

"Baby Nolan," I corrected, carefully.

She raised an eyebrow and then pointed to my son's incubator.  I could hear him yelling, though first it just looked like his mouth was trilling, singing opera, the pacifier-- the emotion-stultifying pacifier!-- lying on its side near his head.  I was pretty sure he was having a fit about his mother's indecision, about his--still-- anonymity, even as he'd become a raging particular.  He was burrito'd in the stock swaddles and had no arms-- they were trapped.   I ran to him and nursed my way to redemption.  The nurse in the area told me ruefully he'd been screaming for hours.  MOTHER WISHES TO BE CALLED, I'd had them write in all caps on the baby's folder.  That worked well...

Baby Nolan, Nugget, I sang to the little person.  Little one, Nugget, Whoever-you-are Gonzalez, I love you, does that not matter more?

Are you so-and-so? we'd ask, as we changed his diaper around his awkwardly jerking, tiny legs, are you so and so? 

No answer. So the baby was not going to pick for us, suddenly open his eyes in rapture and clarity at the sound of his not-yet-definite appellation. No, he was just going to be his newborn self, spastic in the dim lights of the NICU, waiting for us to do something for god's sake.

Sucking and yelling and sucking and quiet, the no-name baby was sleeping! But just for a minute. Crying and yelling and crying and yelling. 

The 12 panic attacks I had considered changing my last name to Gonzalez (and maybe did, and maybe did not) at the court clerk's desk when we signed our marriage license came rushing back to me.  Shakespeare's question is oft quoted, and it rubs: What is in a name?  A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but you'd think of it differently.  If you called a rose, instead, Booty Blooms, try as you might, you'd seen an inflorescent asshole. For example.

Once you've had panic attacks, you have a sixth sense for when someone else is having them.  As I walked the hospital halls, I heard Hasidic babygirl's dad having his own version, sweating under his yarmulke, on the phone with a Rabbi, trying to pick-- or get the Rabbi to pick--what else? --an auspicious name. I had a feeling his question was fraught differently, but in the end, it was the same question.  

He was asking fretfully, jerking to and fro-- Please please help me come up with a good one, maybe Sarah? Sarah you think? And me, Sarah is pretty cool man. But why you stressing it? Let your religion save you for once. Can you not just call her Devorah Leah like all the other little girls in your neighborhood and be done? 

 I shuffled behind him, pathetic people must stick together-- my gray hospital socks somehow making me, awkward from my stitches, weirdly sneaky. I ghosted and glided along the hallways where everyone else's heels clicked, or shoe soles made slaps; a numb spot in my mind where the perfect name should have appeared. The writer's shame...that the noun wouldn't manifest. 

BUT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE FACT...

This new father's obvious discomfort, so public, seemed like emasculation, and I was embarrassed and tickled to witness him so helpless. Truthfully his struggle was validating: even in cultures where naming draws from a fairly small pool, choosing one carries tremendous weight. You don't want to limit someone's becoming -- someone who, for godsake, just became in the first place. Someone who is the opposite of a noun, pure potential and yet total presence. The power of association is nauseating. 

I also hate choosing definitively, and I respect language too much to think it doesn't all come pre-charged, weighed down by figurative filaments, by history, by incidence. It's always fraught; it has always already been taken from you.  Perhaps this is one reason there is such a trend now, a panic even, to spell names oddly, uniquely-- say Micchal-with-two-c's or no e, forever causing a stutter in the poor teacher calling attendance from the roster.  But we also don't want to be corny like that. 

This name is MMINE, the spelling declares, defends-- and you can't even spell it properly.  

The process of picking gave rise to a tilting existential doom for me. Professional Doom. I who had loved the power of words since I first heard them.  The Greek Chorus developed a permanent scowl; got bored; passed notes IS SHE EVEN THINKING?. Not picking at least left open the option one could pick correctly, perfectly, an equation with the baby on one side and all the variables accounted for on the other. 

But instead, this little face, trilling. To chill him and myself out, I sang him a Sanskrit chant, calling on divinities whose names had been chanted by thousands of people for thousands of years trying to get closer to their Big Who. 

Divinities on repeat coming out of my mouth and coating the atmosphere were soothing to me, when the naming process was as sore and ripped open and guts hanging out as me and my new wound.  I held Baby Nolan round the clock, scrubbing in and out, returning with vials of colostrum, until John texted me from the NICU, while I lay in my hospital bed for ten minutes with a onesie over my eyes: "How about Ronen? We can call him Ron."

RON ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? RON SOUNDS LIKE AN IRS AUDITOR WITH ALL DUE RESPECT TO THE IRS.

I cried backwards into my pillow.  ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Everything was becoming all caps, crisis, critical.  I was sure they were not going to let us leave the hospital without something specific to put on the birth certificate.  I was equally sure I was not going to be able to pick, I would die indecisive, so we were going to have to rent this mercifully private room forever, me and ________, and John would move out and go back to work and we'd shuffle around the linoleum and drink ice water from pink pitchers and bone broth heated in their microwave and commune as mother and son, through love alone.

The last afternoon before discharge in fact John had to go off to work, to teach a fencing class, and I was crushed.  I didn't want to be left alone to manage, to check out.  He said, let's flip a coin, I'll pick Ronen for the name if it's heads.  

HEADS? TAILS?

Or, he said, you can pick, and I'm OK with whatever you pick.

Reasonable people are the worst kind because they throw your unreason into harsh contrast. 

I cried, wailed, blubbered.  

And then limped into the closet-sized discharge office.  Brenda, the discharge diva, was an angular, exceedingly tall black woman. Her uniform of hospital scrubs, pink, and patterned in bears, despite how infantilizing it was, didn't jeopardize her power in the least.  I don't know, honestly, how she tolerated the pattern, but she rose above it. She reeked of freshly smoked cigarettes and had a personal pizza on her desk. Her skin was nearly jet black, fresh as perfect ink, her hair so sharply cut around her jaw and cheekbones that it could have been a wig.  Her face gruff, her smile geometric, almost manly. I loved her already.  She frowned at me.  

"I'm here to sign the discharge papers. But by when do I need to pick the name?" I asked. I tried to keep the crisis out of my tone.  I was pure calm, the panic attacks stuffed under my hospital gown with the rest of the damage. 

She shuffled my papers around.  "He was born on Tuesday?"

"3:30AM Tuesday."  Three days ago.  You can feel someone judging you, on occasion. It feels like fireflies dying in a jar whose lid you can't unscrew.  

She frowned for emphasis, again.  I could see that this was like folding a piece of paper too many times along the same crease: eventually it would give.

"By next Tuesday, Honey," she said.  She was both old and ageless and took a big bite of her pizza, and chewed it for a long while as those size bites require. "And don't cry."

This was Friday.  I could live with that.  I had a long weekend. I was a teacher, and we are known for putting too much faith in the restorative powers of a long weekend. 

"Put Baby Nolan on there, then," I said, preserving the matriarchy-cum-patriarchy for another few minutes.  "I'll call you by Tuesday."  Like I actually knew what day it was or would be for the next two months. 

Brenda gave me the frown that was fast becoming her facial signature.  She wrote in flowering script on a post-it note; "Mother will call by Tuesday, 5/XX."

I could only imagine the bureaucratic nightmares that would ensue if that post-it fell off her manila folder, and thought I was setting myself up for interminable headache and anxiety, but I let her frown and post me into submission.   She stuck another post-it on the fat royal blue face-slap of a folder she was handing me with the signed discharge papers.  "Call me, don't forget," she said, and in went the pepperoni pizza.  She waved me out with her non-greasy hand and, wiping the other on a tiny napkin, placed my folder in the big stack. I backed out of her miniature  office, and went down the hall to retrieve my even more miniature bundle. 

God's coin-- the one we hadn't tossed, but which was tossed for us-- had landed on heads, I thought, already sure I was not sure, that I'd never be sure, but that I'd have to pick against and despite the weight of that. 

All the long weekend we called him Ronen, just to see.  And it stuck. 

But Ron?  Ron was the bitter pill of nicknames, and I would not allow for it.  I'd fight to the death anyone who called him Ron. 

And then I thought, Ro.  Ro will do. 

We had ourselves six pound boy, "Ronen Lucis Nolan Gonzalez." A name for a Prince, maybe. 

So, Ronen. Ronen was the matriarchy returned, my mother's Hebrew name-- Rena-- and also meant song of Joy. But there was Ronan and Rowen, both common and loved these days-- so we were sentencing our son to regular vowel correction during attendance checks, or a life with his name so frequently spelled wrong he'd learn to shrug it off.  He'd always be tutoring people which syllable to emphasize.  Maybe he'd change his mind in his 20's-- say it a new way. I was the first one to spell his name wrong at our postpartum visit to the pediatrician.    

And his middle name, Lucis- Latin language, genitive case, "belonging to the light, of the light." His spiritual lineage.  My nerdy background in the classics, my insistence that Luc had to be in his name somewhere, I would have no son, no child, without illumination, and that was also the only thing I could never give him, but that he must find himself in the collective dark. 

Nolan-- my last name, my father's people.  The drunken Irish, the Roman Catholics reaching for the rosary beads or stowing them in the shit drawer.  The name that felt too familiar to give up, marrying late; familiar, like the shape of your own teeth against your tongue. 

Gonzalez-- my husband's last name, and my somewhere-on-paper last name, that I'd never use, and never tell anyone I had legally adopted.  The Mexicans who had long crossed the border into Texas, settled, and began erasing their Mexican-ness; the name my husband's mother had already given up when she remarried her high school sweetheart, trading patriarchy for patriarchy; Gonzalez, the name of John's father, also a John, who died of the most toxic blood the hospital had ever seen, who, more rational than emotive, had written a short note as his mind started to go: "I am afraid of what is happening to me." It was unclear who the note was for. This name that my stepsons have; this name that their mother, to my dismay, still has.  This name that my husband signs at the bottom of his oil paintings, in the good years he has any time to paint. 

Roro, we call him, little dude, Ro, Ro-Bear, Little Bear-- Ronen.  Ronen Lucis. Ronen Lucis Nolan Gonzalez. Do you care? Since you asked...since you once needed so much to know.  Now, I'm telling you. At 22 months, he now knows his own name, that people have names, and refers to himself proudly, Roro.  The first person pronoun has organized his syntax. He knows himself as a person who does things, who things happen to, who should listen when he is called-- and also as a subject. Who can choose not to listen when called.  Who can hear his name, and decide from there. Who says it like it was always his, like there was never any question. 

After all that asking, his name matters little to anyone. I mean, it's a good one  Sure, the chorus might still jocularly eye-roll, might be tempted to say, "But did you think about how Ro rhymes with...."

Yes, trust me, I've thought about it.

A name is just somewhere to start, after all.  It is just the opener to a little life, and way to claim our place in the populus, and something to put on a grave, eventually.   The name is just our initiation into form, into concept. Also, it's our way of saying, hey, you-- and knowing who we mean. Calling out to each other, lest our beloveds forget that we are here; praying that our personhood have had meaning, and be a stepping stone toward the sky.   That we have been somebody's top picks, that we have been what we were meant to be, whatever that is. 

____

Some Notes on Greek Chorus, to be further explored:

Although the historical origins of Greek drama are unclear it may be said it had relevance to religion, art and to the love of expression and perceptive storytelling in general. The origins of the chorus in particular may have stemmed out of ancient rites and rituals with elements of song and dance, and most importantly – the gathering of people.

In order to understand the function of the chorus one must remember that at the origins of Greek drama there was only one actor; and even at later dates no more than three actors occupied the stage, each of whom may have played several roles. As there was this clear need to distract the audience while the actors went off-stage to change clothes and costumes, and perhaps prepare for their next role, the function of the chorus may have had more to do with practicality, than with artistic or philosophical considerations.

Aside from the practical the chorus would have had numerous functions in providing a comprehensive and continuous artistic unit. Firstly, according to a view accepted by many scholars, the chorus would provide commentary on actions and events that were taking place before the audience. By doing this the chorus would create a deeper and more meaningful connection between the characters and the audience. Secondly, the chorus would allow the playwright to create a kind of literary complexity only achievable by a literary device controlling the atmosphere and expectations of the audience. Thirdly, the chorus would allow the playwright to prepare the audience for certain key moments in the storyline, build up momentum or slow down the tempo; he could underline certain elements and downplay others. Such usage of the choral structure-making functions may be observed throughout many classical plays but may be more obvious in some than in others.

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