This past week with the birth of The United Kingdom’s new
royal baby I’ve been struck by how possessive people can get over the names
they choose for their children. I’ve actually seen very upset people posting on
Facebook and in the comments sections on stories related to the little girl’s
birth. Reality check, folks…You’re up set at a young couple who, in some cases,
live thousands of miles away. You do not know these people and will never know them,
yet you’re irate that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge chose the same name for
their daughter you chose for yours. You didn’t invent the name. It has been
part of this couple’s family for hundreds of years. Even the Duke’s uncle, the
Earl of Spencer, released a snarky tweet about the similarity between the name
of his 2 year old daughter and his young great-niece. (Dude! You have seven
kids. The potential for overlap really isn’t their fault.)
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| Her Royal Highness, Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge |
I do understand, to some extent. As a parent I know how much
we agonize over the selection of a name for our children. I know we did. We
took a book with over 100,000 names in it and two different colored
highlighters. We each went through and highlighted the names we liked. Then we
made a list of the ones we both liked and started narrowing it down. Was there
an embarrassing nickname that could be tagged on the child? How did it sound
with our last name? Could we think of a decent middle name to go with it? If we said the name 100 times a day would we get sick of
it? (This happened to me with the name Collin. Loved it, but after trying it
out over the course of a day decided I couldn’t see myself saying it over and
over.)
Again if you’re anything like us, we turned next to the
Social Security site and checked to see how popular the name was. We wanted to
try to avoid having our child be one of several kids in the classroom with the
same name. For our son, the name we chose was down below 150 on the popularity
list. For our daughters, neither name we chose cracked the top 100, and one of
them was nearly at 800th place.
As it turns out all of this was in vain. We named our son,
Aidan. The year of his birth it was below 150th place. Two years
later it cracked the top ten and has stayed there. And if I count in all the
almost Aidan’s… Caden, Braden, Jaden, Hayden, etc., half the boys his age turn
when we call his name. (In my defense, I have never watched Sex in the City.)
Our daughter Taryn’s name was 797th place the
year she was born. It hasn’t really changed, but her twin? Have mercy! When our Sadie Jo was born, Sadie
hadn’t cracked the top one hundred. This year it has risen to 50th
place and this doesn’t count the number of spelling derivatives out there. Just
the one’s spelled the same. A friend of mine’s daughter even chose Sadie for
her daughter. I joked that they had stolen our name, but was I upset?
Not really. A little disappointed and ego bruised that my
names hadn’t been as unique and as different as I thought they would be when I
chose them, but not upset. Getting angry or snippy or down right insulting
about someone else using the name you chose is just ridiculous. As I said
before, you didn’t invent the name. Unless you shook up the Scrabble letters
and let them fall and created a name from them, someone else probably thought
of the name too. And you didn’t trademark the name, which personally I think
shouldn’t be legal (*cough* Kylie and Kendall Kardashian).
So the next time someone uses the name you chose for your
child don’t get snarky. Just realize it simply confirms your belief it is an
awesome name.
