When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t want to tell the kids. Not yet. Not until I knew I wouldn’t miscarry again. Or until I knew my elevated hcg levels (the same ones that generally mean you’re pregnant) weren’t just my cancer coming back.
I was terrified. I spotted, early on. Thought I was losing the baby. Turned out to be normal.
The baby’s weight was low. I was sure we’d never make it to the safe point, and when my spouse asked when the baby would be viable outside the womb, I said 28 weeks. I was at just under 28 and having horrendous Braxton-Hicks contractions at the time.
We didn’t want to tell the kids. But they’d seen mommy go to the hospital this often before, and learned after the fact it was because I had to go in town for chemo and tests. The fear in their eyes when I started going to to the doctor again made me tell them, with a long story about penguins and some eggs not making it that ended with my son thinking we were birds that hatched from an egg.
We had to use a code name, because it was way too early to tell anyone, so the baby became known as Hershey.
A few months later, my eldest begged and pleaded and even wrote a long essay on an honest-to-goodness typewriter, begging us to name the baby Sh’Dynesty. “Comma to the top. That’s God’s comma.” It took me two years to figure out that was a bit from the show Psych, but we still didn’t name the baby Sh’Dynesty.
We didn’t use an Irish name like we did for my eldest, but, like my second child we did choose to use the name of a loved one who’d passed for the middle name. In this case it was my mother in law’s. But the first name we went back and forth, over and under, agonized about what would be the perfect name—something new and classic at the same time. Something you don’t see everywhere but had a feel like you’d heard it many times before. A name no one could pick on but that had a nickname.
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It was a lovely name. The nickname was a flower.
But my son is transgender.
When he first started telling us he was a boy, we thought it might be a phase. He loves superheroes, and while he does love Wonder Woman, The Hulk is his favorite.
But when we realized it wasn’t, we didn’t worry. We supported him. We took him to a therapist to make sure we were doing everything we needed to so that he could be assured of our love and know that we believed him. We asked if he wanted a different name, and he said no. He didn’t understand why he might want a different one; Mom and Dad picked this one.
And we loved that. We loved that he felt as strongly about that name as we did. But eventually, at school, the pressure of peers asking him why he had a “girl’s name” weighed him down.
He wanted a new name. He took exactly two hours to make the choice. It’s a classic name; it’s possibly one someone could make fun of, if they were mean enough.
But it’s his. He chose it.
A small, tiny piece of me mourns the loss of a name we agonized over so much, and the fact that other people made him want to change it; but a far larger part of me feels proud and protective and full of love.
After all…what’s in a name?
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S.M. Roffey is a writer, mother, former early educator, comic book lover, and volunteer cosplayer who lives in the Northeast with her genderqueer spouse and 3 LGBTQ kids. By day she is a virtual assistant to #RevPit’s Jeni Chappelle, and at night she writes adult fiction fantasy. She has studied Anthropology and Early Education, and her personal essays have been featured on The Good Men Project, Shethority, Huffington Post and BlogHer. She is currently writing a novel and blogging about books and writing at www.smroffey.com.
