a Lola by any other name

When I was pregnant the second time around and learned from my amnio that I was expecting a girl, I felt stymied over a name. "I feel like we shot our wad with 'Iris Alison,'" I complained over and over again to my husband.

We soon settled upon "Antonia" as a middle name, partially after writer A.S. Byatt and partially after a relative, but a first name evaded us for months. We named Iris after novelist Dame Iris Murdoch and cartoonist Alison Bechdel, but no literary namesakes could be agreed upon the second time around. I lobbied for "Jane" after Jane Austen, to no avail. The Sober Husband had been traumatized by being made to read "Pride and Prejudice" in high school and could not countenance the name.

"How about naming her after a suffragette?" the Sober Husband offered in a moment of brilliance. I waddled off to the public library and pored through a book about the suffrage movement. The British suffragettes were, to a woman, stuck with unwieldy names, but there were a few Americans with pleasing names. We soon had two finalists, "Lucy" after Lucy Stone (a brilliant suffragette who campaigned for the reform of marriage laws and who pioneered the practice of women keeping their own last name after marriage) and "Julia," after Julia Ward Howe (author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as well as a notable suffragette and abolitionist). Later we flirted with "Lydia," after Lydia Becker (editor of "The Women's Suffrage Journal").

We let then three year-old Iris Uber Alles decide. "The baby in your belly is named LUCY," she said emphatically, over and over again.

"If she doesn't like her name, I'll just tell her, 'We let your three year-old sister name you,'" I said presciently.

And she didn't like her name. As a toddler, Lucy referred to herself as "Baby." When she potty-trained, she decided that as she wasn't a baby any more, she would no longer be called "Baby." Refusing to answer to "Lucy", she was nameless for a while. She tried calling herself "Gaa" (which sadly enough I didn't realize until much, much later was her attempt to say "Girl" during her worst apraxia, before speech therapy), but that didn't get picked up by anyone. I frankly refused to introduce my child to anyone as "Gaa."

Then Iris Uber Alles rented the movie "Shark Tales", which the children watched over and over again one week. It was about the same time that Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, and my nameless child was smitten with the glittering gold-digging fish, "Lola", voiced by Ms. Jolie. "Lola!" she said. "I Lola."

For the next three years, she was very insistent that the name "Lola" must be used. In our home, the word "Lucy" was on a par with the n-word, absolutely abhorrent. Lola went so far as to get upset whenever I listened to the Lucy channel on satellite radio, always forcibly changing the dial to "the one and the two", as she called the X-Country station, over her mother's ineffectual protest.

The only person who would not use the name "Lola" and persisted with "Lucy" was big sister Iris. Iris, very passive aggressively, insisted upon always saying, "Lola, oh I mean Lucy" in a way which made "Lucy" sound like an imprecation.

But then last week Lola saw a "Barney" show about the meaning of names. She then went on a kick, insisting I look up the meaning of everyone's names. I already knew the meaning of my name, "Carole", which means "bright sound", and the meanings of "Iris" (which means either the flower or a rainbow, after the goddess Iris who is the goddess of the rainbow). The children howled when it turned out that the Sober Husband's name has no known meaning. Lola's best friend's name, "Louise", means "fierce warrior", which is extremely appropriate given that she fights with Iris without regard for the usually daunting age difference.

The trouble came with looking up "Lola." As a derivative of "Dolores", it means "sorrows" or "pains." Lola found this frankly depressing. Lola was indeed so troubled by this that she actually reverted to "Lucy", which means "light." This shocking development caused Iris, who had stubbornly refused for years to ever use the name "Lola", to suddenly take it up. She now now refers to her sister as "Sorrows" or "Lola Sorrows."

"I'm not SORROWS!! I'M LIGHT!!" Lola/Lucy yells at her sister, with a dramatic flourish of her hands up towards whatever light fixture or heavenly body is visible.

The Sober Husband and I, long trained to refer to our child as "Lola", are having trouble adapting to this name change. We now call our daughter "Lola-I-mean-Lucy."

It's hard to predict whether this change will stick. I do know one thing, though: I'm glad we looked into role models, rather than relying upon baby name websites. I've become addicted in spare moments to hitting refresh on the random baby name generator at thinkbabynames.com. It invariably yields such gems as "Swanhild Damaris" and "Pocahontas Roderiga" (and the Thinkbabynames people insist "Pocahontas" is a Hebrew name meaning "playful", fascinatingly enough). I've just got to keep Lola/Lucy away from that site, though. I wouldn't put it past her to suddenly insist upon being addressed as "Pocahontas Roderiga."