Today’s guest blogger, Ilya Welfeld, describes her journey towards the perfect–and inevitable –name for her daughter.

Is it wrong to admit that I sometimes want another child just to name it?  That at times, that desire is so powerful as to supersede memories of chafed breasts, sleepless nausea and the exhausting reality of carefully raising a precious child?

The awe-inspiring and all creative opportunity to put a name to a life has seduced me like a secret lover – a passion you cannot acknowledge despite the obsessive hold it has upon your every thought.   After each child, I have wondered… will I ever name again?

When pregnant, I pour over books, bookmark websites, read messages boards, post and poll as I consider what to call each child.  I can’t resist the urge to utter new names, explore meanings and sounds from languages and family lore. The names of our children have all been inspired by a relative who has passed away. This, a Jewish tradition, not only adds beautiful meaning to the act of naming, but honestly helps narrow the focus. I can’t imagine having A-Z available to me.

When I became pregnant with our daughter, our third child, my naming obsession went into over-drive. My husband begrudgingly played a game night after night just before we closed our eyes. I would ask – “If you had to pick a name right now- what would it be?” Sometimes he managed a measure of enthusiasm – and names like “Jana” or “Samara” emerged. Other times, befuddled by my obsession, he would grunt “Brunhilda” and flip his head around to face the other wall while I lay frustrated that he didn’t share my passion for finding the perfect name.

But all the while, we knew there was one name to reckon with, a name that might make moot all ten thousand entries in baby name books.

My grandmother was a magical person, a warm, loving beacon to those around her.  We called her “Grandma” – a word that meant love and comfort, chicken soup, chocolate ice cream, ivory soap and freshly swept carpets.   But of course, we were not going to name a little girl “Grandma.”  My grandmother had a given name.  As a matter of fact, it was one of the most popular names of the century.  The previous century, that is…. Her name was Dorothy. (more…)

Journalist and New York City mom Laura Dunphy reports that the pressure is on for Gotham parents to choose baby names that are more creative, more unusual, cooler than those anyone else is using. But no matter how hard you try, you still might not make it.

Ah, New York, New York.  If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.  And if you can name your baby here without needing therapy or Xanax, then I applaud you.

That’s because like everything else in NYC, baby naming is intense.  If most people think naming children is a pleasant activity, like badminton or a picnic, Manhattanites treat it as a competitive sport, like rugby or bond trading.

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Guest blogger Dionne Ford swore she’d never do what her parents did: give all her kids names starting with the same letter.  And then she discovered the up side of coming from a family with a unified name theme.

When I was a kid, I hated my name, not just because it rhymed with peon and my teachers couldn’t pronounce it, but because it made me an amorphous indistinguishable entity from my siblings. We are all Ds; Debra, Diana, Derick, Daniel and Dionne. And if that wasn’t enough, we have matching middle initials – Js for the oldest boy and girl, Ls for the rest of us.

Tongue-tied at almost every meal just asking one of us to pass the salt, my parents often resorted to addressing each of us by D. I grew up thinking my parents couldn’t remember my name.

I swore I’d never play such a cruel joke on my own kids.

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Guest blogger Mary Elizabeth Barr Mann’s family has always called her Bessie, a name she deems fit only for torch singers, great beauties….or cows.

My birth certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth” . Perhaps more importantly in my family, my baptismal certificate reads “Mary Elizabeth”. But, to my father and my brother, I am “Bessie.”

My mother’s name is Mary, and so my father has never called me such. Dr. Freud would approve. And while my extended family makes the distinction by calling me “Mary Beth,” somehow my dad came up with Bessie and thought it was adorable. When my parents discovered that Bessie was easy for my toddler brother to pronounce, it stuck. At least on the nuclear level.

As you might imagine, in my adolescence, I did not like being Bessie. It was not, nor is it yet again, popular. While the U.S. Census pegged Bessie as the 13th most popular girls’ name in 1880, it plummeted out of the top 100 by 1930 and nosedived from the top 1000 by 1970.

Worse yet for my teenage years, Bessie is neither sleek, nor sexy. It is not stylish. Not a single model in Seventeen magazine ever had that name. And, though somewhere in a corner of Park Slope there may be an urban hipster mother plotting to bring back the name is a burst of ugly-chic, to this day Bessie remains shunned.

The nickname didn’t bother me as a very young child. Heck, I was surrounded by relatives with equally unattractive, ragged-old-laundry-hanging-in-the-back-alley names—like Reenie (for Irene) and Mossie (for Martha). But by my teenage years, I really, really wanted my dad and my brother—and by now my younger sisters who had gotten in on the act—to quit it. The worst was when my brother’s friends would tease me about the name: “Bessie the cow.” “Old Bess, my gun.” (And this from a kid with a big schnoz whose surname was Finnochio. Sheesh.)

Sure, there was Bessie Smith. And Bess Myerson—the first Jewish Miss America. But that was IT. Unless you were belting out the blues with a voice full of sorrow and steel, or you were transcendentally beautiful, this was not a good name. With my reedy soprano, eyeglasses and frizzy hair, I was none of these things (although I have since graduated to contact lenses!).

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It’s no longer just foreign royals who are using multiple middle names for their babies.  More and more parents–both celebrity and civilian– are doubling or even tripling up, seeing it as an opportunity to widen their naming options, both in terms of honoring a namesake, or just for the sheer pleasure of choosing and bestowing an extra name or two.

One appealing possibility is that of honoring both maternal or paternal grandparents, as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin did using all fourof their parents’ names for their children– Apple Blythe Alison and Moses Bruce Anthony. It’s also an opportunity for a Mom to use her maiden name –a venerable tradition–along with  another, hand-picked one.  This is among the positive points brought up by posters on our message boards—the fact that it allows you to use one of your favorite names along with either your maiden name or that of some other family member you might want to honor.

There are some minor downsides including possible future bureaucratic snafus down the road. Smitty wrote in a while back to say that she works in the medical field and that “When women marry and hyphenate their names or keep their maiden and middle names and add their married names, the computer system we have can freak out.” –and forms like Social Security limit you to one middle only,  in effect depriving a person of recording her full name (so you might want to consider the order of the middle names quite carefully.)    (more…)