Name Game

Names are a big thing.

Playing ‘pretend’, the girls spend hours deciding the names of all the characters. Making them up. Changing them. Tweaking. Choosing a double name, or a first and second name. Reminding each other. Asking me if Aliocatrora really is a name and how to spell it. Then choosing Elsa. Or Aurora (Sleeping Beauty to the uninitiated).

Sometimes the pressure to get the name right is so intense, one of them will yell out, “Mummy!” And I fear a fight is breaking out. “Yes, love.”

“I can’t decide!” And I know what is about.

Sometimes a fight does break out over this; That’s the name I wanted. I was going to have that name. Hurry up and decide a name. I hate that name. That’s my favourite name. You can’t have it. Just choose a name.  

When they were born we didn’t know what to call them, despite hours of discussion. We took weeks to settle on names. Hoping to reduce the pressure, we decided they would all have second names. This was of little help. On the day we went to register them I was certain I wanted to change middle names around. The pressure to get it right, with it being a once-in-a-lifetime-no-going-back-this-will-be-with-them-forever decision was intense. I resented friends and family text messages ‘have you chosen names?’ The ‘yet’ implied. And I regretted the many times I’d asked new mum friends ‘what’s their name?’ And subsequently, silently, concluded something about them, their partner, the innocent baby and it’s life ahead once a name was chosen.

The need to name, and name everything, and for the name to have meaning beyond a direct label must be deep inside us, developed in our DNA, at the root of our language capability. A dance around Chomsky’s limit of our language being the limits of our world. 

I’ve just tuned back into their play. They have moved on from lengthy debate about names and are mid game. One has just said, “pretend my sister never knew that I was married to Santa.”