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This week’s Open Adoption Roundtable topic is:
Write about names/naming and open adoption.
When you adopt, naming isn’t necessarily straightforward. You have many choices:
- Keep the name the child’s birthparents (or other caregivers) gave him.
- Keep a portion of the name the child’s birthparents gave him, but add a name of your own.
- Change the child’s name entirely.
- Name the child in conjunction with the child’s birthparents.
It’s amazing all the emotions, troubles, and power struggles that occur around names. These aren’t limited to open adoption relationships, mind you. A pair of friends of ours would not tell anyone their child’s name until it was on the birth certificate, so fearful were they that their parents and relatives would rip it to shreds. Two sets of Jewish friends spent hours coming up with the right names to honor their families.
I think it’s important to remember that everyone has their own opinion of practically every name they’ve ever heard. I would never name a girl Tanya because of run-ins with women with that name. My son’s godmother wouldn’t name her son Jonathan because she taught a holy terror named Jonathan. Her husband thought it would be cool to name a girl such that her initials would spell KEG. (”She’d be really popular at frat parties!”)
I’ve known since I was 8 that I’d be having a baby girl named Cassandra one day. If my potential daughter’s potential birthmother hated the name Cassandra, would I change it? No. And though I’d feel sad to lose a match because of it, if she decided to go that route, that would be her right. I’d rather she do that, then continually call the child by another name for the rest of her existence.
I wrote a bit about names back in May on the US Infant Adoption blog: What’s In a Name?. I touched on naming Jack, but never really went into what happened.
My husband and I have a deal – he got to name our boy and I get to name our girl. In the months leading up to adoption, but before we had “matched”, he had a dream in which we had a baby named Jack. We had discussed Jack as a tribute to my husband’s grandfather, John. The dream sealed it.
At the end of our “match meeting” with S, she said, “You’d better think of a boy’s name because that’s what you’re having.” When we told her we had chosen Jack, she started calling the unborn baby Jack. She put the first and middle names we chose on his birth certificate. She wanted to put our last name too, but the state of Missouri wouldn’t let her.
At the time, it never occurred to me to find this odd. It was only later that I found out that some parents name the child with the birthmother. Or that sometimes, the birthmother names the child something completely different, with some parents changing the name and some making it a middle name. I also realize, looking back, that perhaps not naming Jack was one of the ways that S distanced herself from the baby.
Naming is a deeply personal decision, and not one to be taken lightly. Just ask my nephew when he’s being called “Cyrus the virus” in science class.
Photo Credit: Robyn C. 2005. All rights reserved.
I am in the process of adopting my 5 year old foster child and was asked what I wanted his name to be after adoption. Until now I thought only to change his last name to mine or make his birth name his middle name with my last name. My reasoning for this was that this may be an open adoption involving possibly his birth mother and definitely his paternal grandfather,as he has set up a trust fund for him and is considering paying for his education.
I recently found out that his middle name is the name of the birth father who is a mean and disgusting man and will never even lay eyes on my son again, so my son’s middle name will definitely be changed. (I am sorry for the uncharitable outburst, but knowing what he did to this child makes it hard to be objective.)
I would appreciate any suggestions or ideas.
In my family, middle names are for family members or close friends. Is there someone else in your family, the birth family, or a family friend whom you would like to honor? You son might be old enough to have an opinion as well.