What's in a name?

We've taken a dark turn here this week, into the world of gas pains. Augie spent two nights and a day crying and nursing and spitting up continuously. I'm not exaggerating. He nursed 18 times in 24 hours and he nurses for at least 35 minutes each time. You do the math. I spent two nights and a day thinking I was losing my mind (how do mothers of colicky babies stay sane?) until I retrieved -- from the furthest recesses of my memory -- a mention of infant gas drops. I sent J to Walgreens and prayed. I'm pleased to report that they were a rousing success and Augie drifted into sleep almost instantly. But anyway....amidst all the crying, I pleaded with Augie to stop. I found myself begging: "come on Aug, please Augie, breathe August, you can stop Gus, really, you can." You get the idea. I'd cycle through all his names and all the variations on all those names. And it reminded me why we named him August, or at least partially why: so we'd have scores of nicknames to use. But that's not really why.

J and I had talked about baby names for a few years and we always hit upon the same problem. There were dozens of terrific girl names. We had lists upon lists upon lists of them. But in the world of boy names, we were utterly impoverished. It's not that we didn't agree; it's that nothing sounded right. There seemed to be no beauty in boys names; nothing rolled off the tongue; nothing sang, at least not in our ears. Neither of us wanted a tough, macho name and we were both attracted to old-timey ones (maybe that's why we have a dog named Homer). For a long time, we considered naming our son Arlo and I think that's the name we both loved the most, but ultimately I couldn't do it. It just made me too sad and frankly, I didn't want people horrified that I'd named my son after my dead dog. There'd be too much explaining.

I don't remember how we first hit upon August. I've always liked the playwright August Wilson, but not enough to name my kid after him. We both thought of Bellow's Augie March. In the end, I think we just liked the way it sounded, kind and quiet, with a bit of old wisdom thrown in. When he was still in utero, we often called him Baby Gussie and I thought that I'd call him Gus (another canine tribute to my childhood poodle). But since his arrival, I've settled into Aug and Augie and the Gus variations have fallen away.

His middle name, Emanuel, was easier. That was J's grandpa and we decided early on that we wanted to honor him. He died before I met J, but everyone tells me that they were two peas in a pod: both fastidious (ahem, neurotic?) and hygienically precise. It also felt important to include J's family in his name because he has my last name.

When we decided to stay in Berea two years ago instead of moving for my work, I issued a series of ridiculous demands. I've forgotten them all except the promise that any children we had would bear my last name. I know the logic here might seem fuzzy, but I reasoned that I was giving up a tenure track job to move to Kentucky, with no guarantee of continued employment; the least J could do was give up control of a hypothetical child's name. This was marital compromise at its most crude. But it turns out this didn't need negotiating. J was happy to let me use my name. I think it makes him feel good every time he can remind people that he's a feminist and so taking my name just makes sense.

At the very end of my pregnancy, I learned that August is actually a family name on my side. It was my grandfather's grandfather's name and the middle name of his other grandfather. And then it's scattered throughout 19th-century genealogy of the family. So maybe my liking the name is actually a vestige of aural memory deeply encoded in my DNA. Either way, we still just like the name, and five weeks in, he's decidedly an August.