I loved you before I knew you

I can't remember who asked me how we came up with our children's names, but I've never really written about it in one place, so here are their stories.

Shortly after Matt and I were married, I had a dream about Suzannah. This was a few years before we planned to have children, but it was such a vivid dream that I never forgot it. I dreamed of a daughter so real I could smell her, could feel the fuzz on top of her bald baby head. I was standing over her crib, and she gave me the sweetest smile -- her very first baby smile. I called to Matt, "Get over here! She's smiling! Hurry, you'll miss it!"

He rushed over, but by the time he got to the crib, she'd climbed out of it, gotten on a two-wheeler, and pedaled away.

I'm sure there are lots of ways to analyze that. But what really stuck with me was her name; I knew with absolute certainty that this was our daughter and her name was Suzannah. And it's funny, because the entire time I was pregnant with her I thought I was having a boy. (It wasn't a preference; I think I wondered if I'd just have boys, to teach me some kind of lesson about learning to live with a bunch of messy procrastinators. What better way to learn patience and grace, right? I'll tell you a better way: I was given a daughter who is, in many ways, uncomfortably like me. I think that's probably going to teach me a whole lot more about patience than living with miniature versions of my husband, but that's another post.)

Matt and I agreed on Suzannah as our girl name right away; I didn't have to talk him into it, and we never really had any other names on the table. Choosing a boy's name was much more difficult. I like a lot of boy names, really; in general, boy names are so much easier for me, so it's probably a good thing we never really had to debate our girl name. However, every time I'd present an idea to Matt, he'd shoot it down. The best response I ever got for a boy's name was, "It's not awful, I guess." (Note that he never actually came up with any himself.) We finally decided on one we both liked, but when our daughter was born, despite my weird belief that we'd have a boy, I felt the most profound sense of recognition -- of course. Of course it was this child. Our Suzannah.

When I got pregnant with Isaac, I didn't have any sort of intuition about the sex of our baby. (And given my track record, I didn't even try.) In the last couple of months of my pregnancy, I began to strongly suspect that we'd have a boy -- but mostly because Suzannah was adamant about this, and they (who are "they" anyway?) always say that the siblings know these things.

Interestingly enough, we tossed around a handful of girl names, and the one we finally settled on was beautiful and I loved it, but I kept trying out others. ("What do you think of this one?" I'd ask Matt, right up to the end of my pregnancy. And he'd shake his head.) But Isaac's name was our boy name from the very beginning. Even more interesting: our top boy name from my pregnancy with Suzannah didn't feel right. At all. And Isaac was never one of our choices when I was pregnant with her.

I'd forgotten all about this until today, as a matter of fact. But I was flipping through my journal, and I ran across an entry I wrote last winter, months before I saw that second pink line: I had a dream early this morning about giving birth to a baby boy, about nursing him. His name was Isaac. I don't even remember writing that, but reading it now I do remember the dream. It was very much like the dream of our daughter; I knew that this simply was our son, at least in my dream. And while we didn't find out whether our baby was a boy or a girl this time either, when Isaac was born I felt that same sense of: Of course. I just knew him.

I never thought twice about my children's names after they were born. I did plenty of second-guessing our boy names the first time around and our girl names the second, and if things had turned out differently I might have felt just as comfortable with the other names we'd chosen -- but all I know is that once my babies were in my arms, I knew exactly who they were.