Names

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be part of the Open Adoption Bloggers list to participate, or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table.

OAR #6 is on the subject on naming adopted children, following on from this Production, not Reproduction post. Since we’re hoping to become parents soon, naming has been on my mind more than usual.

It’s amazing how emotive an issue naming a child can be. We decided years ago, whilst still trying for biological children, that we wouldn’t reveal what the kid’s name was going to be until after it was born. That way we’d avoid most of the input from relatives who wanted a say in choosing the name, and also, it’d be too late for anyone to object if it was a name they really hated. It’s hard enough for me & Karl to agree on a name, without input from everyone else.

Add into that a first family as well as an adoptive family, and things get even more complicated. I can’t imagine the two of us, plus the expectant mother, and possibly the expectant father, being able to agree on a first name before the nine months are up! They have to have some input into the name though. If this child is to belong to all of us, then their name needs to come from all of us.

I like the way some others have handled this though, with the birth parents choosing the middle name and us choosing the first name. I’m not sure I could do it the other way around (we pick the middle, they choose the first) – unless the kid decides differently when they’re older, their first name is what they’ll be known by, and we’re the ones who, day to day, will be having to call out their name. It needs to be a name we’re comfortable with.

Of course, then we’ll have the problem of whether the two names go together. Choosing a last name will hopefully be easier – whichever of Karl’s or my last names fits best with the given names, that’s (probably) the one we’ll go with. Though we still haven’t ruled out just choosing a different surname for the kid altogether. I don’t think either of us feels a particular attachment to our own surnames, though we’ve both had work published under them, hence us each keeping our own. Hey, maybe if one of the birth parents has a particularly cool surname, the kid can keep that one…