I went to a gathering of former co-workers last night, and one of them freaked me the hell out. He and his wife have six children, ranging in age from 8 to 22, and he was saying, “Five children, huh? Let me give you some advice: don’t have a sixth.” He was telling me stories of how difficult it is to have so many children, so many issues, so many expenses. They lock the pantry because otherwise the boys eat a week’s worth of groceries in an afternoon. Someone always needs something expensive: braces, new glasses, lessons. There is nothing worse than a 13-year-old girl.

This conversation caused it to occur to me that perhaps having lots of children is easier when it’s lots of babies than when it’s lots of teenagers. I’ve been humming along thinking, “What’s the difference, really, between three children and four, or five, or even six? It’s just more of the same thing.” I’ve even pushed this philosophy with Paul, who, if you remember, had a crisis over the discovery of this most recent pregnancy and had to be talked down. I wasn’t just saying I thought five would be fine and not much different than four, I really did think so.

Now it seems as if our family of four children, with its convenient twins at the end to prevent one youngest child being left alone with the parents at the end, was the ideal family, and that we’ve screwed it up. In fact, it seems like we should have stopped at two like most people. Two children would have been a happier life. We’ll never be able to afford the expenses of five. We’ll never be able to rear them right, because we’ll never have enough time and energy to teach everybody everything they need to know. We’ll be one of those families social services keeps an eye on because we’re so disheveled and disorganized and our kids don’t even know simple things like not to drip pee all over the toilet seat.

Time to talk myself down. The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s common for parents to be the doom police to other parents. I remember when I was pregnant for the first time and very excited about it, there were a lot of people who said things to me such as, “Yeah, it’s really exciting when you’re pregnant,” and “Just wait until he’s born: you’ll never sleep again, you’ll never go out again.” Then he was born, and it was okay. There were some difficulties and adjustments and midnight crises and so forth, but nothing as bad as I’d been led to believe. When I said so, those parents changed track: “Sure, it’s easy now, wait until he’s a toddler.” He became a toddler, and it still wasn’t as bad as predicted. So the other parents changed again: “Sure, one is easy; wait until you have two.” I had a second, and it wasn’t as bad. And so on, and so on, and so on: every time I say something’s not as bad as I’d feared, there’s someone to tell me that that’s because I’m a naive fool who hasn’t yet experienced real parenthood. So my first possibly reassuring thought is that it could be the same in this situation: older children do come with their own set of difficult parenting situations, but it won’t be as bad as the other parents are making it sound.

I’m remembering, too, that when Rob was a baby, Paul and I would freak ourselves out by wondering what it would be like when he was five years old. We would get upset about the whole idea to have children, because what were we going to do with a five-year-old? We didn’t like five-year-olds. We liked newborns. Now we were totally screwed, because he wasn’t going to stay a newborn and then we’d be stuck with a five-year-old. But by the time Rob was five, of course, it was fine: he’d gotten there one hour at a time, and we liked him just as much as when he’d been a newborn–more, in fact. My guess is that freaking myself out about the kids being teenagers is just as silly.

My last thought, and the most important one to me, is that it’s not as if there’s anything to be done about it now. Short of selling some of the children on the black market, I’m stuck with them. I’m a mother of five, and it’s not as if I can go back in time and try it again with two. So there is no sense getting all upset about making bad decisions, especially since I don’t even know if they were in fact bad. Maybe I will always be glad I had lots of children; maybe it’s what I want, even though it isn’t what someone else wanted.

My apologies to those of you who are thinking, “Oh my dear god, enough with the baby names,” but I have another name-related thing to discuss. Semi-Desperate Housewife‘s comment on the post “Boy Names” brings up an interesting topic: names that someone you know has already used for their baby.

I have been wondering what the etiquette is for this, and I have not yet found anything standard. There are some people who would say it is never okay to use a name that anyone you know has used, not even if you’re not related and you live in different states and you’re not really in touch. There are people on the other end of the spectrum who think it’s okay for cousins to have the same name.

I’m in the latter group: if a sibling of Paul’s or mine named a baby the same thing we’d named one of our babies, I’d think that was fun. But I’m aware that not everyone is at this end of the spectrum with me, and so I like to be careful–and I get tense if someone I know is considering a name we’d consider, because I’m worried they’ll use it and then I’ll wonder if we’re “allowed” to use it or not.

What do you think, and what have you heard are the rules? Ask first? No one owns a name? First come, first served? Does it depend on the popularity of the name; i.e., no one can say “Hey, Emily is our name!” but it would be out of line to use the name Apollonia right after your friend did? Does it depend on your connection to the other person; i.e., the closer the relationship, the more off-limits the name? If a friend or relative uses a name you wanted to use, how could you broach the topic to find out if they’d be okay with you using it too? Is there ever such a thing as having “dibs” on a name you haven’t yet used but would want to use some day?

I hope Shelly won’t mind that I’m totally pilfering her excellent comment (from the post “Boy Names”) for this new post. She wrote:

I like nearly all of the names you have listed, with Henry my favorite (as if my opinion matters). Why is it so hard? & what do you do if you have namers remorse?? We sort of do b/c we didn’t want to name our 4-month with an ultra popular name, but I fear we did, though we spelled it differently. It’s such a fine line between wanting to have a unique name but not wanting to look like you just randomly threw syllables together just to be different.

I’ve been thinking of this all afternoon, ever since I read the comment. It brings up so many interesting issues.

Issue the first: Avoiding an overly popular name. One reason I love The Baby Name Wizard is that she gives the heads-up on which names are getting too hot to handle. But her book also gave me some of the most reassuring baby-name-choosing advice I’ve ever had, which is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to choose a popular name: it’s popular because lots of people like it, and that means lots of people will like your baby’s name. You wouldn’t necessarily want to go with Hortense or Herbert just to avoid popularity. I also like to keep in touch with The Social Security Administration’s list of baby names, since that’s a great way to see which names are rapidly shooting up in popularity even though you hardly ever hear them: you can type in a name and it’ll tell you the popularity rank of that name every year since 1991. Sometimes I use it to avoid popularity, and sometimes I use it because I actually want a more common name.

Issue the second: And that brings me to namer’s remorse. We didn’t name our second son William, as you know from my post on pseudonyms, but it would have been a better choice than what we DID name him, since there were three children with his same name in his preschool class. There are two with that name in his kindergarten class. Holy crap, we had no idea. We thought we were choosing a boy name that was common, yes, but in a one-per-classroom way, not in an everywhere-you-turn way. We can’t totally regret the choice, because now the name is HIM; he IS that name. But on the other hand, I’ve winced many times over the years since he was born, wondering if we should have chosen something different. You can legally change the baby’s name if the remorse sets in right away, but pretty soon it’s too late and you just have to give a shrug and a wry look and say “We had no idea!”

Issue the third: The point Laura Wattenberg (The Baby Name Wizard’s author) makes about how you don’t necessarily want to choose an unpopular name brings me to the issue of whether or not I would want the opinions of other people on the names we’re considering. The answer is YES. For example, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that two people already have voted for Henry, because it’s a name I worry about using in case it gives too many people the feeling of “old man name.” Other people’s opinions are an important part of which name we choose, and so I’m glad to have input.

Issue the fourth: Why is choosing a baby name so HARD? Shelly, my empathy buckets RUNNETH OVER. I think the reason it’s so difficult is that it’s so important, and because there are so many choices. Sometimes I wish I were part of a group that had specific naming rules, such as that the baby had to be named for a relative or a saint, because it would narrow things down a little. You have to choose how popular a name you want (three in her class with the same name? or mocked because her name is so crazy?), and what style of name you want (flowery? androgynous? classic?), and whether you want to name her after a family member. And of course, most people have to make all these decisions with another person–sometimes a person with whom you can’t even agree on a thermostat setting. It only gets harder with subsequent babies, since then the names you choose can’t be too similar to what you’ve chosen (if you choose Owen, you probably won’t want to choose Ewan) or too different (if you choose Matthew, you probably won’t want to choose Jett).

If anyone else would like to chip in here on choosing names, please do. Tell how you chose, or what factors were most important in your decision, and whether you regret any of your choices. Tell about your own name, how your parents chose it, whether you liked it or didn’t.

I was getting out all the tiny boy handmedowns from the basement. Usually this is a task that fills me with a disbelieving, fascinated happiness: “There will be a real baby, and it will be in this house, wearing these clothes!” Instead I got a jolt of nauseated doubt: “I don’t even think I want another baby. I don’t think I even like babies. Why would I want to start all over again with another baby, getting up in the night, nursing, changing those numerous blowout diapers, dealing with an infant who cries or looks neutral but never smiles? And I’ll be sore and puffy, and I’ll be so tired, and I’ll know that when all I want is some quiet and some time with nobody touching me, Paul will be thinking about when can we have sex again. And all this will be happening with not only a new baby in the house, but two toddlers, plus two older children home from school all summer. Oh my god.”

It was an unpleasant few minutes. The only way through this kind of feeling, I think, is a combination of (1) waiting it out, and (2) remembering that I’ve had this feeling about previous babies and now wouldn’t want to exchange even one of them for store credit. Right now, this new baby is unknown to me, a theoretical baby. Soon his existence and safety will be just as essential to my continued happiness as all the other children’s. It is hard to comprehend this now–but then, the whole mother love thing is hard to comprehend. How can it be that people who didn’t even exist a few years ago are now so important to me that if they died I would want to die too? That’s ridiculous. Nine years ago I was living just fine without a single one of them.

One of the things that appeals to me so strongly about pregnancy is the way it so radically alters the world. An entire person appears as if from nowhere. And your life as the mother of this person will be completely different than if you had gone down the path where that baby never was. But this appealing magnitude and importance is also what freaks me the hell out, as well it should. Creating a new person is no small thing, and it shouldn’t feel like it is. It feels better to focus on the thrill of it, but it seems natural that the thrill of it is paired with the near horror of it.

When I find myself focusing on the “What have I done?” side of things, I find it useful to pull the camera back. What I am really doing here is continuing the species. Reproducing. This is a totally ordinary–even banal–activity. Eat, sleep, bear young. No big deal.

Or it helps to fast-forward. In twenty years I’ll be well into my 50s. I’ll be fretting about what to wear to my son’s wedding, and I’ll be trying not to tell women with tiny screaming children that these are the best years of their lives. I’m not going to care anymore about the morning sickness or the worries about spacing or the worries about who has to share which toys, and my guess is that one child more or less isn’t going to seem like a big difference at that point. My guess is that I’ll be struggling to remember that we’d only planned to have four. My guess is that it will seem unthinkable that we wouldn’t have had this boy, too.

Okay, let’s get to work naming this boy. Now that I know I need boy names and not girl names, I feel fresh enthusiasm for the task. This despite our boy name list, which is PITIFUL. I asked Paul, “Do we have ANY boy name candidates?,” and he said, “No.”

We actually do, but it is a far from stellar list. Most of them, we’ve rejected repeatedly with previous boys, and so the names have a worn, tired feeling to us. Others have serious flaws. Here’s the list, with their problems:

Alan: We’re afraid this is too old and not old enough: 1950s names are not a great choice right now. Also, might be geeky. I like it partly because of the character known as The Brain on the TV show Arthur (his actual name is Alan). I also like it because of Alan Alda, but he doesn’t help with the geek factor. (Nor does The Brain, I suppose, but I find him so appealing I can’t see it that way.)

Charlie: Both of us dislike the name Charles, but don’t want to use Charlie as the given name. And I don’t think the name Charles would grow on us.

Henry: We’re worried that this one was a late-’90s mini-hit that is now Over–without being Over enough to have regained its classic status. Also, until the late ’90s, I thought this name was the epitome of geeky and old, and I’m not sure I’m past that. My mother was horrified when I mentioned the name (during my first pregnancy), and with each pregnancy since has worried that I will use it. I think she’d get used to it, but I hate to torture her on purpose.

Leo: This is the frontrunner as far as I’m concerned, but Paul is still thinking of it as a blatant reference to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m more worried about all the references I’ve seen lately to how great it is with the name Max, since I’m heartily sick of the name Max and other names of that sort, such as Sam and Jack. (All three of those names–Max, Sam, and Jack–were on my list in 1998 when I was pregnant for the first time. I think the reason I’m so sick of them now is that I thought of them as such Awesome Fresh New Ideas when I thought of them, and then experienced the crashing disillusionment of discovering that we all think of great names at the same time. Were Emma, Isabelle, Ava, and Abigail also on that list? Why, yes they were.)

Oliver: We have a cat named Oliver. We’ve had him our entire married life. I think that’s too much to get past. Plus, we often call the cat Olive, and I think that’s a bad sign for the boy’s name.

Elliot: We don’t like the way it can be Eliot, Elliot, Eliott, or Elliott. Also, we’re both sort of so-so on the name to begin with.

Riley: Really, really, really like it. And it is a vile clash with our surname.

Miles: I don’t know. It’s a noun. It sounds plural.

Oh, man, is there any hope? I’m looking through The Baby Name Wizard hoping to add to the list, but I just don’t like anything. Boy names are so b-o-r-i-n-g.

Another boy!

I think girls are more fun to dress and more fun to name, and I prefer the traditional girl toys. What I like about boys is the thought of when they’re older, and presumably kinder to me than the girls would be. Also, lower wedding costs. On the down side: smellier.

I remember when I was expecting my second, I was really hoping for a girl (our first was a boy), because I wanted a largish family and didn’t want people to think we were only having more kids because we were “trying for a girl.”

When I was pregnant with the twins, I was hoping for two girls: I wanted to dress them alike sometimes, and also I thought that made a nice balance of two boys and two girls.

This time around, I wasn’t sure what to hope for. Another girl, so Elizabeth would have a sister? Another boy, so she wouldn’t have to have a sister? Another girl, to make the boy/girl balance more even? Another boy, to let Elizabeth keep her “special only girl” status? Another girl, to save her character from the serious special treatment problem?

I didn’t really think of it only in terms of what would be best for Elizabeth. I also considered the fun of getting to re-use girl clothes (I am so sick of all our boy clothes, after seeing them three times now), the room distribution problem (easier if she can share with another girl? or easier if she can be put in the smallest room because she gets her own?), and that Rob and Will were hoping for a boy.

For me, one of the biggest reasons for wanting a girl was that I wanted the experience of a single-birth girl. I’ve had the single-birth-boy experience twice, and I’ve had the boy-girl-twins experience, but I’ve never had the experience of having a single female baby.

I think it is starting to sound as if what I wanted this time was a girl. In fact, I was unsure what I was hoping for. One reason I was hoping the ultrasound could tell us the sex of the baby is that I wanted to stop wondering what I was hoping for.

…BOY!

The ultrasound technician was completely certain: she used the word “definitely” three times, and in previous pregnancies the best I’ve gotten is “95% sure”–and usually more like “75% sure.”

We’re so symmetrical! Boy boy girl boy boy. (Elizabeth is 1 minute older than Edward. That counts!)

Elizabeth hates sharing a room with Edward; she will be very glad that she doesn’t have to share a room with the new baby. Edward will go with the new baby, and we will turn our current small computer room into a room for Elizabeth.

Holy crap, it’s a BOY! Finding out is such a shock to the system. It’s a little like seeing the second pink line on the pregnancy test: you have to reorganize your whole brain to deal with the new information.

I was up late last night, all agitated about things I knew wouldn’t bother me so much in the morning. It started with a cold, the kind that settles with a heavy gunky feeling in where I imagine my lungs to be, and I spent some time worrying about whether I would go see the doctor (and then he would say, as he did last time, “Suck it up, buttercup: it’s a cold,” and I would feel like a whiny hypochondriac) or not (and then it would turn out to be a horrible virus that would hurt the baby). While I was awake anyway, I started worrying about names for the new baby. Here we are halfway through the pregnancy and we have no frontrunners. That led me to worry about the ultrasound tomorrow (today): what if they can’t see if the baby is a boy or a girl? Then we’ll have to choose TWO names. When I was pregnant with the twins and had an ultrasound in the 18-20 week range, two technicians looked very carefully, and neither technician could even guess on either baby. Then I started worrying that I’d forget that I had an appointment and I’d miss it.

I feel better now in the morning light, but I’m still worried they won’t be able to tell me if the baby is a boy or a girl. It would be so disappointing to have to wait.

I’ve been paging through books on choosing paint colors: our house is done in mostly Apartment Cream throughout, with a few Model Home Inoffensive Pastels to break up the monotony, and the number of smudges and chips is reminding me on a daily basis that it is getting to be time to repaint. One book assured me that choosing colors was no more difficult than choosing an outfit. The author didn’t understand how a woman could put together skirt, blouse, jacket, hose, shoes, belt, earrings, and necklace, but not feel able to choose colors for a room.

I don’t know how to tell this author that every day I wear: (1) one of two pairs of nearly identical jeans, the only difference being that one pair has, mysteriously, red pocket linings, invisible from the outside; (2) one of three t-shirts, two in muted blue and one in muted green; (3) white socks; (4) orange/khaki/white sneakers; (5) one of three pairs of gold hoop earrings. Every day. I don’t think this qualifies me to pick out a piece of fruit, let alone colors for a house.

One problem I have is that I decorate in a style I call “75% Off At Target.” If I commit to a wall color, I drastically cut down on which things from the clearance section will look right in that room. Plain cream gives me more options. It also helps me showcase how tall my children are: just consult the smudge line. It gets a little higher each year.

I do envy those homes I see where the bold colors in one room flow in beautiful contrast and harmony into the next room: oranges into yellows into blues, so lovely. I don’t know how anyone knows which colors to choose; those little rectangles on the strips from the paint department are far too small. I read a great idea about buying a pint each of the colors you like, painting pieces of poster board, and pinning them up on the wall so you have larger samples to consider. But how do you narrow it down to the point where you know which ones to get pints of?

Holy crap, am I the only one who hadn’t realized that the United States is a republic and not a democracy?? I don’t know how I missed it, since it’s right there in the Pledge of Allegiance, but I did, and there it is, and maybe we can move on now from how little I was paying attention when I was droning that pledge in elementary school.

There is so much talk out there about democracy, I guess I just assumed that’s what we were. I was getting exasperated about how supposedly democracy means we all make the decisions together and yet sometimes it seems as if a small group, or even a group of one, is making huge decisions against the wishes of a larger group, and there’s nothing the larger group can do about it except be dragged along. That’s when I discovered the republic situation.

I don’t know if I feel better or if I feel worse. It’s nice to have things make more sense (“Oh, I see, the reason it seems like we have no say in this is that we DO have no say in this”), but on the other hand it makes me feel even more helpless. Not only do we as individuals hand over decision-making power to other people, we don’t have much choice when it comes to which individuals we can hand it to.