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The next Open Adoption Bloggers Roundtable is another tough one. It’s about the huge minefield some of us like to call Naming Your Child. As the social worker conducting our pre-adoption classes said, “Naming is claiming.” Certainly one of the ways that we say “this is my child” is to give them their name. In a lot of cases, naming is changing. Obscuring. Or not.
Some families choose to keep their child’s name as it was at birth. Dawn has written eloquently about their family’s decision to keep the name her daughter’s birthmother gave her. Some people change it completely. I do know of at least one older child who requested to have a name change when he was adopted “because (he was) a new person now.”
Some adoptive parents do what we did – they use their child’s original name as a middle name, and give them a new first name. When we first read M and S’s profile/questionnaire, they mentioned that School Girl already had a name; if we wanted to change it that would be fine with them, but she did have a name. At the time nobody mentioned that she had both a first and a middle name already.
We didn’t learn that until after the papers (to be submitted to our county Family Court for finalization) had been signed. Would I have done things differently? Maybe. Maybe we would have gone the route of some of our Catholic relatives and our child would have had 4 names instead of 3. Never mind that they don’t do that for babies… Maybe we would have kept her names the way they were, even over the objections of our extended family. At the time, as I recall, they were objecting to a lot of things already.
I’m not sure what we would have done. I know that School Girl’s birthfamily called her exclusively by her original name until she was at least 1. Every time we send letters, cards, and/or pictures, we always sign her name with both her first and middle names. Something from each of her families, just like the rest of her life.
I’d love to hear what you decided about your child’s name. If you haven’t adopted yet, what are you thinking about naming your child? Will you leave your child’s name the way it is, change it, or do some of each?
Naming our baby wasn’t a make or break thing for hubby and I. We really thought we wanted to collaborate with birthparents on it.
Our son’s birthparents had called him Spencer during her pregnancy, they didn’t want to call the baby ‘it!’ Spencer is not only a good name, but it’s his birthmom’s middle name. We wanted him to have that name in some way to always give him that connection to her.
We discussed naming with his birthparents once (He was born very early) and well, birthmom wasn’t crazy about the name we had selected. She liked the name, but he ‘didn’t feel like that (name)…’ OK, fine. So hubby and I talked some more. We liked Spencer a lot, but it sounds a lot like our last name and it just didn’t sound good together! We knew we wanted to keep it as his middle name, though.
So on the way to the hospital (50 mile drive)when he was born 11 weeks early, we decided on a first name half way there. He was born at 6:30 and by the time bmom was in her own room it was 11pm. She wanted to know if we had decided on a name. She and her parents were the first to hear us say “Calvin Spencer.” Everybody loved it. And it fits him perfectly!
That’s a great story! Thanks so much for sharing it.