Cultivating personality through names

When I was pregnant with The Boy, The Man and I reflected that while we were ok with giving a daughter a more unconventional name, we wanted a fairly conservative name for our son. It just seemed to us that going through life for a man with a very unconventional name was going to be strange; girls could get away with it more.

And until recently, I've held the same view, but a few days ago I had another glance over our list for boy names and made a face. I didn't like any of them. And now we're looking into books once again, but the names that are making the list for our potential second son are much, much more unconventional than the name we gave our soon-to-be older son.

I'm not sure why the change; partly it's because I picture a younger son as a younger child -- my older son as the responsible, cautious one (he is cautious, I'm not painting this on him. Responsible, not so much. But he's four.) And my younger son as the rebel, the fun one, the funny one, the one who can get away with a less conventional name.

And I realize that before one is even born, and before one's even fully formed, I have these conventional ideals for my sons that may be nothing like who they are. Maybe my second son will be the conservative lawyer that I picture for my first; the first will be a circus gymnast (unlikely. but still.)

And I feel bad about this, this picturing, because as their mom I do have a fair amount of influence over them, and I worry (a little, not the sitting up at night kind) that in naming them I am unduly creating paths for them that they may not want for themselves.

My parents did this. They gave my sister a nice, respectable name. They gave me one, too, but then they called me a nickname that frankly surprised The Man when he first learned it -- that a grown woman would use that name. I still use it; I can't imagine myself any other way. But it did cause someone once to ask me in a job interview, someone who knew my sister, if I was the younger irresponsible sister. I was put into that box as a late teen, most notably by my father, and I chafed against it, was resentful of it.

And I don't want to do that to my son.

It will be so much easier in some ways if this child is a girl.

(I did have a dream last night that I gave birth to a girl, a girl that I had to dress all in blue because we only have clothes for little boys. A little girl who was nameless for a week because her father had to go on a business trip the day after she was born and the name we had chosen wasn't appropriate and we hadn't yet decided on a new one. Everyone in the dream asked me her name and I couldn't answer. I registered my displeasure over the actions of the dream Man with the real one upon waking.)

I don't think that naming is destiny; my child River may well become that conservative lawyer despite his name. (No, we're not naming him River.) It's more the expectations I have formed, already, in my head, for the two of them. The expectations I will have of them as children. How they will behave, whether I will be more lenient with behaviour with my second child than I will be with the first.

I already know things will be different for this next child. With the first one, I was the cautious mother. He didn't interact with a screen until he was two; even then it was shows of less than five minutes in duration. For months afterwards I would always sit with him when he watched. He didn't eat non-organic food until he started daycare (because then I had no control!). He drank only water for two years until I introduced juice -- the fresh squeezed kind, organic, and only heavily diluted. He never had a bottle. No processed food. He didn't have candy until he was three, no fast food, no chocolate. He was never left to cry, not once.

All of this has been completely dismissed, by the way. Today he ate chocolate for breakfast and he'll likely spend several hours watching shows while I do something different. There are processed crackers and cookies in the kitchen that he eats, all non-organic. Oh, we still try and feed him well, but the point being that the standards have relaxed. A LOT.

My greater purpose with this reflection is that I won't be able to do that for the second kid. There will be screen time before two, juice in a bottle, and Pepperidge Farm fishy crackers as one of his first finger foods. There will likely be some sleep training, and he'll be left to cry just because I'm trying to dress a four year old and get breakfast and make a lunch and there's only one of me. Things will be different just because they are different now. I don't have the time -- or the clone needed -- to create the same environment for this next kid.

I suppose that that will create a different personality for this kid as much as any name I happen to give him. My recollections of childhood are vastly different from my sister's; perhaps it is indeed true that each kid in a family grows up in a different household. And that, more than any name, will be the deciding factor in conservative lawyer careers.

Which then in the end gives me the leeway I need to name him River.