Namesakes

My mother called a couple of nights ago, semi-drunk as usual, in part to let me know that my grandmother's health is failing. Because of the semi-drunk part, I didn't ask a lot of questions and therefore don't know much by way of details, which makes it hard to determine how serious this is, but I'm guessing it's at least somewhat legitimate.


As I have mentioned before, my grandma and I have always had a special bond. One of my favorite girl names is my grandmother's middle name (and was her mother's first name, as well as my paternal grandfather's paternal grandmother's first name). I like it on its own, it has a nickname I like, and it has personal meaning. In a world in which I made unilateral decisions, this is the name I would give our child should said child be a girl (and I felt this way before any recent downturn in my grandmother's health). But P doesn't like the name. At all. And this makes me sad. Since I know it's not his favorite (okay, since I know he really strongly dislikes it), I've been trying to push for it to be the middle name rather than the first name, especially as it would go with most of the options currently on the table first-name-wise. And while he hasn't outright vetoed it, I know him well enough to sense that his silence is not one of acquiescence but one where he hopes I'll just drop it.

I'm into genealogy, and connecting to the past while honoring family tradition and legacy are important to me. And all of a sudden, with both of my remaining grandparents nearing the ends of their lives, it feels even more so. P, on the other hand, is more of the mindset that all names that belong to anyone he has known, family or otherwise, are generally off the table, I think for fear that using the name of someone else will give the impression that we're naming after them and that person (or their closest living relatives) will get some sense of undeserved honor. And in the end, the genealogy/honoring relatives thing just doesn't have any salience for him (which it doesn't for a lot of people -- I get it).

With boy names, we've done well on finding names we both like that have some meaning to us, but it's been much harder with girl names, in part because the girl names in our families are almost universally unpalatable to us (as a sampler, our grandmothers are Ed.na, Mil.dred, Wil.ma, and Est.her), either in general or in combination with our last name, and in part because P is partial to French names for girls, and we aren't French (and also in part because it's much harder to use a last name as a first name for a girl). I just wish there was a way we could both be truly happy with the name (or, for now, names) we choose, rather than just ending up with a name we "like".