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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Mr. Mom's world
Stay-at-home dads face down stereotypes and learn how undervalued the work of child care really is.
By David Case
[05/14/99]

Drama Queen
Drama Queen call for entries: Dorky Dad
Tell us about Pop's domestic trauma and you could win a $100 gift certificate from barnesandnoble.com -- and a video from Globalstage to keep your child busy while you use it.

[05/14/99]

Feline funeral
Burying a beloved pet forced my mother to bury her past.
By Kristina Robbins
[05/11/99]

How the Alvarez girl found her magic
A girl whose life dangled by a story showed me how to redeem my own.
By Julia Alvarez
[05/10/99]

Minor saints
My grandmother's small gestures of love live on between me and my son.
By Janis Cooke Newman
[05/07/99]

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The name dates me almost as well as a birth certificate. If there are two women, Susan and Brittany, which one is the mother and which one is the daughter? And which is the father, David or Justin? This may be why some Susans change our name: we don't want to be pigeonholed: "Hello, Sophie? This is Sigourney. Did you hear about Sierra?"

Find books by Susan McCarthy at BARNES & NOBLE

Why do names suddenly become popular? It's easy to understand why names stop being popular -- when people have had time to notice that every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Susan, they switch to Brittany. But why Brittany? It can't just be the sound -- there's a charming fuzzy-leafed herb called Dittany of Crete, with the fabled power of drawing arrowheads out of wounds, yet do you meet little Dittanys? If it's the French connection, why just that province? Where are the children named Normandy, Burgundy, Corsica, Armagnac? What makes the breeze stop whispering Louise and start hollering Jessica?

The Susan situation is why middle names are vital. We Susans need middle names to fall back on. Ideally a common first name is accompanied by an unusual middle name. Don't just silt up the interior of your child's appellation with extra surnames (Bob Smith Jones). Make it Bob Theodoric Jones. Conversely, if the first name is the unusual one, give the child at least one easy middle name as an alternate. Don't stop at Hepzibah Roosevelt Umiak O'Leary Podzorny, make it Hepzibah *Mary* Roosevelt Umiak O'Leary Podzorny, so if she gets tired of being asked if she's the noted serial killer Hepzibah, she can be Mary. Though I kind of like Umiak. Some people think middle names are needless frou-frou. But in addition to offering choice, they are also vital in dealing with government bureaucracies, which give no sign of going away in our children's lifetimes. Consider this all-too-plausible scenario:

I know that when you, Chris Place, married Leslie Hard, and the two of you took hyphenated surnames, you were confident you were the only Hard-Places in existence, and that when you chose to name your first-born Rocky, you believed your choice was unique. Delightfully unique. (In Europe they have laws against that sort of thing, but this is Liberty Hall.) You didn't bother with a middle name because you didn't want his name to be too long. Yet when little Rocky -- or Rock, as he will prefer to be called when he has outgrown babyish nicknames -- establishes a credit rating, he will infallibly find that he is being confused with other Rock Hard-Places, that he is getting their nasty mail from the IRS, their phone calls from angry creditors and their death threats from ex-girlfriends. This is a confusion that would be easily fixed with a middle name. (No. Not Andy. You've gone far enough down that road already.) Why not Umiak?

Next page | Even the name Zenobia starts to sound plain