MY VIEW
Naming one’s child is an act of love
When my daughter Chloe was born, it had taken months of tense negotiations between her father and me before we agreed upon what to bring to the delivery room. As our daughter’s second birthday approaches, I recall how selecting her name was somehow prescient.
Chloe’s name means, according to various sources, spring or verdant. It is associated with growing things. Fittingly, Chloe was born during one of the worst snowstorms of the winter, shortly before the official start of spring itself. Though her father and I had selected two names as possibilities, in the delivery room he opted to allow me the final say.
When I looked into my girl’s eyes for the first time, I saw a gleam of pure green in their depths. With snow covering the view outside my window, I knew this baby was Chloe. Who knew that she indeed would be the breath of fresh air in the room, my personal springtime?
I suppose all babies bring change with them, bring sunshine into the lives of their parents, grandparents, strangers. But I like to believe our Chloe is the embodiment of her name. She is joyful and spirited. She has a girlish nature, but also that inner toughness necessary for taking on new challenges, the seedling pushing toward the sky through all obstacles. She is afraid of nothing, yet she is considered in her actions, taking necessary risks, not reckless ones.
Chloe makes everyone smile, like that first warm day that smells of sweet rain and wet dirt, with the sunlight glinting off the new leaves. Her inner heart matches her outer beauty.
One of the neatest things to me is the number of compliments we get on her name. Shortly after her birth, her father had some buyer’s remorse with the name and asked if we could still change it. Thankfully, I had already turned in the forms.
I am glad we did not change her name, though she has peers with exotic place-sounding names like Savannah, Sierra and Aurora. I wonder sometimes if she would have felt more at home with them if we had decided to call her Siena, one of the names on our list. Still, she is indeed a Chloe.
Having never liked my own name, feeling it was too indicative of the ’70s, too boppy for my less-than-boppy personality, I fear my daughter will not like her name. I have since come to a greater appreciation of my own name and my parents’ hopes for me when they chose it.
Something in my name spoke to them. It was not a random choice. Like me, my parents had doubtless tried out the idea of other names, but for some reason, only Jodi felt right. As I get older, Jodi has grown on me — or I have grown into it. Now, having my own daughter, I can better appreciate that giving a child a name is an act of love that lasts a lifetime and beyond.
When I married, I changed my last name, but I kept my given names. Every name tells a story. And every child deserves to know why you picked her particular name. This is the stuff of family legends.
The love one feels for one’s child starts long before she is born, when parents are just beginning to acknowledge that they will have the responsibility of naming another person. A child’s very name is an act of your love for her. What better legacy can we leave our children than a name that means, “I love you”?
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