The Names that Got Away

Featuring, for some reason, BLTs and Home Depot

For the first week of her life, Tanner and I kept calling Sally by the wrong name.

I gave her multiple other monikers — Mary, Caroline, Ruby, Sophie (my childhood dog) and Darby (IYKYK). Tanner twice called her Blair, our niece’s name (and what Foster insisted we should name her before she was born).

My mom’s theory is that we didn’t say Sally’s name enough before she was here. She might be right: I am tight-lipped about our baby names until those babies are born. When I was in labor with Foster, a nurse asked me what his name would be so she could write it on the info board in the room.

I paused.

“I honestly don’t know if I can tell you,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t even told my mom!”

But we are done having kids, so let’s talk about the names that weren’t meant to be. I’d describe our style¹ as familiar but uncommon,² with some personal meaning to us and a slight vintage tint.

Boys

Wright: Our runner-up name for Foster, an homage to Wright Thompson, one of our shared favorite writers. (Wright started his career as a sportswriter. This piece on Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday is worth your time even if you’re a Duke fan. This piece on going to the Masters after his dad’s death will make you sob even if you don’t give a rip about golf. And his latest book, about the untold story behind Emmett Till’s murder, is one of the hardest but best things I’ve read this year.)

I thought for sure this would be baby number two’s name had we had a boy. But Tanner pointed out that the hard R and T in Wright don’t sound great with our last name, also full of hard Rs and Ts. (If we don’t know each other in real life: It’s pronounced Free-vurt.)

George: Our pick if Sally had been a boy, after Tanner’s maternal grandfather. I was skeptical of this choice for much of my pregnancy because of the name George’s (relative) popularity³, but every time I’d say it in my head, I’d hear a happy intonation, like I was saying it with an exclamation point. George! It grew on me. (We would have paired it with middle name Winstead, my mom’s maiden name.)

Clay, Hank: Names I loved but couldn’t get Tanner on board with. Both of these are a nod to my granddad Henry Clay. To Tanner, Clay was too redneck, and Hank was a dog’s name.

Dean: Yes, after Dean Smith. Tanner one night: “It just feels too much like hero worship.”

Lewis: A complete non sequitur. Weirdly, this name popped in my head after seeing the name Stuart on a giant Santa inflatable with a naughty or nice list. Stuart made me think of Lewis (no idea why). I scrapped it partially because I thought he’d have a lifetime of people confusing the spelling (Lewis or Louis?) and partially because “my mom saw a different name on some holiday decor in Home Depot, and her brain did a random word association thing” is not what I mean when I say “this name is meaningful to us.”

Besties.

Girls

Statia: A longtime favorite of mine, after my great-grandmother. It’s pronounced “stay-shuh,” but for some reason her family chose a straight-up wrong spelling rather than the more common Stacia. I adore its old-fashioned Southern feel, but I knew it’d be misspelled and mispronounced her whole life. (Tanner also never liked it.)

Georgia: After another one of my great-grandmothers, my granny. (Henry Clay’s mom!) She died when I was a senior in high school, and we spent a good bit of time with her growing up. She lived on the side of a mountain in the Blue Ridge, right over the Tennessee-North Carolina border. She had a zip line in her backyard and a working cold spring right outside her back door, and whenever I picture heaven, it looks an awful lot like the view from her front porch.

Mae, Florence: Two more family names. Tanner felt that Mae sounded too old lady-ish, and I felt that “Florence Frevert”sounded more like a character in a Magic School Bus book than a name for a real person.

Lucy, Merritt: Names I liked but that held no significance for us. Well, that’s not true — Merritt’s is one of my favorite restaurants in Chapel Hill. I lived across the street from it in grad school and have fond memories of smelling the bacon cooking as I waited for my 8 a.m. bus outside the shop. But “I’m named after a really good BLT place” is almost as bad as “I’m named after something my mom thought of after she saw a hardware store Santa’s nice list.”

1. By which, of course, I mean my style — Tanner is neutral on basically all names and name conversations.

2. In 2023, according to the Social Security baby name database, there were 230 boys born who were named Foster. Sally hasn’t cracked the top 1,000 names since 2004, when there were 265 girls born with the name.

3. 2,689 babies were given the name George in 2023. And yes, I do recognize that my excessive use of the baby name database to determine whether my kid will have a ~unique~ name makes me insufferable.