Mendolonium

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

We are officially changing our baby’s name to Theodore Henry…

My last pregnancy was a difficult one; filled with a pervasive never-ending “morning” sickness, punctuated by anomalous test results.  When our baby boy was born unexpectedly and unnaturally a few weeks early I was at a loss as to what to name him.  Feeling as if I owed him a proper name at the very least we settled, somewhat uneasily, on the name Henry, the name we had most often discussed during my pregnancy.

What most people don’t know is that for a time, when he was a day or two old, we called him Theodore.  The idea of Theodore as a name was a relatively late addition to our pregnancy discussions and I was unsure about choosing a name for our baby that I thought I had not mulled over sufficiently.  I also didn’t want to be one of those families who named their children with names all beginning with the same initial.  Never mind that there was no rule that if I named our second child Theodore, that the third child would then be required to have a name beginning with T as well.  So Theodore was out and Henry was in.  And although his name read Henry William on his birth certificate, at night I sang Theodore to sleep and every so often I used the name Theodore in the light of day.

When I was pregnant with our baby I worried that I didn’t know him as well as I knew his brother.  This second child was more of an enigma; he moved less in utero, more deliberately, less frantically than his brother had.  I was distracted by the demands of caring for a toddler.   I longed to make a deeper connection to him and I hoped that it would come naturally after his birth.  About two hours after he was born, I rested in my hospital bed, the baby swaddled beside me, Jeff sleeping in a chair.  The baby began to fuss.  I tried nursing…pretty much my one infant calming trick.  No, he wasn’t interested.  “Now what?”, I thought considering waking Jeff, the baby soothing master.  I hadn’t slept properly in thirty-six hours and I was  suddenly overcome by a wave of exhaustion and a slight edge of panic.  What did he need?  I am his mother, I should know how to help him.   And then a thought came to my mind, “Pick him up and hold him up against your chest.  Rub his back.  He will like that.”  I did so and he instantly calmed down and contentedly fell asleep.  It was like magic; completely out of the blue…I had never held Thomas like that, to this day Thomas is not particularly fond of being touched much less massaged.  But somehow, somewhat inexplicably,  I knew this new little baby, I knew that he would like being held just like that.  I leaned back with my perfect new baby against me, the morning sunlight streaming through the window onto us and I thought, “I know you…”.

I did know him and I should have trusted my instincts about him and his name.  He is not Henry William.  He is Theodore Henry and he knows it.  And when I call him Theodore he comes smiling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Theodore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.