PJ Media When I gave birth to #1 son, husband and I were beyond broke. He’d quit his job so he could stay home and look after me through a bad case of pre-eclampsia and this landed his finding-jobs attempts right in the middle of the 91 jobs depression which seemed to make all programming jobs vanish from Charlotte, NC where we then lived. We paid our Visa with our Mastercard for six months until he found another job. Which when you have a brand-new-infant born under COBRA, for whose complicated birth you owe around 20 thousand dollars is … scary. Took us three years to pay off the baby (amid jokes he’d be repossessed of course) as well as the financial damage of that time.
Which is why when #1 son was three months old, and I got an invitation to attend a – what the heck did they call it? — paid survey session (I think) on baby naming and why we’d named our baby what we had, I jumped at it. It netted us $50 (I think) with which we bought toilet paper and rice if I remember correctly.
For all that, I think they got precious little from me. When they asked my baby’s name and I told them “Robert Anson” the entire group (100 parents, plus interviewers) stared at me in shock. They asked, hesitantly “Is he named after a grandfather?” and I thought furiously how to explain, then said, “Yeah. Let’s go with that.” After which they ignored me.
I was the discordant note in a perfect chorus up till then, though. I don’t know what some marketing company wished to know about baby-naming habits, but I’m sure the resulting end was that they were delivered a page that said in really big letters: Everyone is trying to make their kid different by being like everyone else.
Because I sat there through a couple of ours of outlandish names I no longer remember, save a likely blond (her parents were) named Rwanda (her parents seemed quite unaware it was a country, and thought it was a creative spelling of Rhonda), a weirdly spelled Genesis, where the parents didn’t know this was a book of the Bible, and the truly amazingly spelled Aeaehraeon (pronounced Aaron.)
And every time the parents were asked why they’d named the child some kind of spelling abortion, they said: “I want him/her to be unique.”
Because I am a horrible person – who studied languages (and language) in my misspent youth – I kept thinking “Brother (or sister) if that’s your child’s only possible claim to uniqueness, he/she’s going to be a sad little clone.”