As a caveat, I’m pretty sure that this is only a problem because I study children’s literature for a living.
We’ve been having conversations about what noun to use to refer to this baby pre-birth. This doesn’t sound hard, except that we are also wanting to keep the gender* and actual name a secret until birth. That leaves us with gender neutral nicknames. Enter my inability to not analyze the rhetorical implications of such nicknames. Diminutive and pejorative nicknames for children are very common in children’s literature and it’s something that we talk about in 170. Ideologically it says a lot when we call adults by their given names and children by names that highlight their smallness, naivite, or general less-than adult/human status.
Even in we going to reveal the gender, I’m not sure that the problem would be solved. I can’t handle names like Junior or Little Man in general and the majority of female nicknames (Princess, Missy, etc) are so incredibly sexist and pejorative that I currently am doing all I can to not rant when someone else uses these terms in reference to my baby.
On to the gender neutral terms….here are my major issues….
Fruity: Many pregnancy calendars compare the size of the baby to a fruit**. While I get that this is helpful, especially in describing very small sizes, 40 weeks of fruit becomes somewhat of a stretch and rather weird. Even the sentence structure of these fruit comparisons, weirds me out. “Now the size of a [insert random fruit here], the baby….” Seriously, we are going to start each week by noting which edible object the baby has “grown into.” I’d prefer inches or cm, even if it means I have to get out a ruler. Apparently the fruit comparison is so popular that many people pick a fruit and refer to the baby as that throughout the pregnancy.
Aliens: These nicknames include things like Bug, Grub, Tadpole, Pod, Squid, Unit, and The Spawn. These names weird me out because of the non-humanness. I get the fact that early on babies don’t look very human, I told C that ours looked like grub on the ultrasound, but I can’t imagine using this as an actual nickname. These also bother me because they remind me of some of the ways that pregnancy is treated in children’s literature (i.e. headless, namesless woman with “window” cut inside stomach).
Religious: It’s not that I’m not religious, but these names are too over the top for me. Referring to the unborn baby as “gift from God” or “God’s little angel” seems pushy and not me. I have no objections for people who use these, they just aren’t for me. Although I do have to say that I would use this before I would use something like Spawn, which in my mind is always followed by “of Satan.”
Dr. Seuss names: I love Dr. Seuss, but nonsense words are often discussed in a pejorative sense as well. You would never call an adult doodle or twiglet. It’s one thing if the name is from a small child, but I can’t imagine willing using these as nicknames.
Gender Neutral pejoratives: Squirt, Bubble, Kiddo, Little One, Little [insert noun of choice here], Sparky. These are all names that are used to not children as less than. If I didn’t spend the rest of my life deconstructing the ways children are “othered” in children’s literature, I might be able to handle these, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
Random nouns: This category is pretty much a catch-all. It seems like many people have a hobby/interest that lends itself to this type of naming (baseball, slugger, spud). Okay, so our options would be book or running shoe. Neither sounds like a winner to me. Also popular (but weird in my mind) is using a variation of the city where the baby was conceived.*** Great, once again “normal” doesn’t seem to work either.
Ruling out those doesn’t leave much in the gender neutral department. If I could think of a good children’s lit reference, I would use that, but at the moment, I’m drawing a blank. This baby may spend the next 29ish weeks being call “HeSlashShe”
*We don’t know the gender at the moment, but are planning on finding out. We just won’t tell anyone else when we do.
**In case you are wondering my baby is now somewhere between the size of a prune and a fresh plum. No, I’m not joking. They did use the dried version of the fruit right before the fresh version of the same fruit. Being the literary nerd that I am, when I read “your baby has now moved from a prune to a fresh plum” I thought “great it’s aging backwards. I’m giving birth to Merlin.”
***Even weirder is that this is popular as the actual name as well.
