Exploiting My Baby by Teresa Strasser

Author:Teresa Strasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

thirteen

Dragging My Names Through the Mud

One minute, you think naming your son Shane is going to give him a chaps-wearing leg up in life by bestowing on him all the quiet coolness of a 1950s movie cowboy. The next, you’re sure naming him Shane will make him the poopy-pants, wheezy outcast who sits out gym class because he forgot his inhaler.

It’s a big job, naming a human being.

Girl names are a littler simpler because you can run your nominees through the “attorney/first date” test.

After committing a crime, you don’t want to hear, “Hi, I’m your court-appointed attorney, Cinnamon.” On the other hand, if I’m fixing you up on a blind date with my cousin, you won’t be especially psyched for dinner and a movie with Judith. Basically, choosing a girl name boils down to finding one that doesn’t free-associate to either stripper or spinster. She should be fine introducing herself by first name in either a boardroom or the freshman mixer.

When naming a girl, you’re just trying to thread that needle, which I think I did with “Harper.” In any case, I loved that name and now that I’m having a boy, I can’t seem to come up with anything that feels just as right.

For boys, almost every name seems to fall into one of two categories: too boring (John, Robert, William) or too hip (Jasper, Asher, Logan).

Aside from which, our boy will be half Jewish and half Catholic, so his name should suit him in either world. Christopher has always been one of my favorites, but that’s not so fun on the bimah. I should know about religiously confusing first names, because I’m fairly certain I’m the only Jew named Teresa on the planet. Trust me, no one wants to share a name with a couple of saints when attending Hebrew school with a very elderly teacher who eventually just ends up calling you Rachel, a name you answer to for several years just to save time.

On the other hand, I’ve always liked having a name that allows me to “pass” as a gentile, because while I love my people, not everyone does, and when I’m in, say, Kentucky reporting a story on the Appalachian poor, it’s nice not to have to introduce myself as Shoshana. On that trip, as a matter of fact, I was sitting in a tiny diner eating grits when I overheard this tidbit: “Did you know Jew ladies breast-feed their babies until they’re five years old?”

That’s when I borrowed my coworker’s crucifix for the rest of my stay in Kentucky.

Shoshana might know something about Jew ladies, but Teresa most certainly does not.

All the years asking my parents why they chose such a Catholic name for me, they insisted that it’s Hungarian and seemed confounded about why it’s a big deal. Now, though, I’m very grateful to be ethnically vague. I’m not going to saddle my child with some unmistakably Jewish name like Chaim (my grandfather) or Irving (two of my uncles), but maybe I don’t want to go all New Testament on him either.

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