Use the Name, Drop the Frenemy

As if the final weeks of pregnancy aren’t uncomfortable enough, I’ve spent the last few reeling from the news that Courtney, my nemesis, stole my girl name.“She didn’t exactly steal it,” my husband Andy has pointed out. “She used it. She didn’t know we’d chosen that name.”This was just semantics. Since it was Courtney, she probably picked up some kind of name vibe off and run with my name just to goad me.I could only kick myself. Just a few weeks before, we’d been out to dinner with Courtney and her husband, my platonic childhood friend Matthew. He had wanted to know our names. But, because they wouldn’t divulge theirs, we’d refused to tell them.“If only we’d told them the names,” I keep saying to Andy. When something like this happens, there’s no way to stop revisiting the issue “I should have had a V-8”-style.“What do you think would have happened then?” Andy finally asked me. “Do you really think they would have abandoned the name just because you said we were using it?”“I don’t know,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter. The point is: We would have claimed it.”“It’s not like calling ‘shotgun’ and getting the front seat, Eve,” he said. “Announcing a name doesn’t give you exclusive rights to it.”“It’s not the exclusive rights I care about,” I explained. “It’s that if we’d told them first, then they would’ve known it was our name and they’d have had to decide whether or not they still wanted to use it.”Andy scrunched up his face, clearly not buying it. “I still say, you can’t claim a name.”I could have debated the point further. Instead I said, “You so aren’t a girl,” to which he had no argument.The bottom line was this: Because I hadn’t told them our baby names, and Courtney had her baby first, instead of them deciding whether or not to use our baby name, we were deciding whether or not to use theirs.But in Andy’s view, there was no decision.“Of course we’re still using the name,” he said. “We like the name. They don’t own the rights to it.”I knew he was right. But it hardly mattered. “The idea of using Courtney’s name just gets to me.”“But it isn’t Courtney’s name,” he said.“Right,” I replied. “It’s mine. She stole it!”“Look,” said Andy, in voice-of-reason mode, “if the fact that they used it ruins it for you, we can choose another one.”“No,” I said, on this I was adamant. “I’m not letting her ruin my name for me.”My husband threw up his hands in exasperation, to which I said, “Exactly!”With seemingly no way out of this pickle, I turned to the one place I knew I’d be greeted with sympathy and understanding. I logged on to Citybaby.com, posted my plight, and asked “WWYD”?Some people wanted to know the name, but, since I knew Courtney used this board, I refused to divulge it. Still, almost everyone said they’d still use the name. “How many Johns are there out there?” someone said. “Go with the name you like. Period.” “You can’t let her dictate your name,” read another reply. And then there was my personal favorite, “Use the name, drop the frenemy,” to which I replied, “I wish.”A few more days of brooding later, I felt I had the name thing decided.“I think we should still go with the name,” I told Andy. I explained that one of the Citybaby posters had gotten to the heart of it. “I can’t give Courtney that kind of power over me.”“Good,” Andy said. “I think that’s the right decision.”I nodded, proud, like him, of my newfound ability to think rationally.“Besides,” he said, “it could still be a boy.”“True,” I said. And if not, perhaps something another poster said would actually come to fruition. “Once your baby comes,” this Citybaby-er wrote, “you’ll have no time for her and she’ll go from nemesis to non-person.”The Brooklyn Chronicles, a work of fiction, appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached atkschwartz@nysun.com.

Use the Name, Drop the Frenemy

Use the Name, Drop the Frenemy

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