Sportswriter Matt Crossman figures out who his daughter is
From the day last January when my wife and I found out she was pregnant, I called our baby Avajack. I refused to go all the way until the Big Ultrasound calling my baby It. I chose Ava because I like it and Jack because I watch way too much 24.
I didn’t know until later that prenaming babies is common. A friend in Kirkwood named Cooper called his Mini. Another friend who lives in South City called hers The Deuce, and she emphasizes that “The” was always present. A friend of my wife’s, last name Meyer, called hers Oscar. At first I thought it might be another weird St. Louis thing, like jokes on Halloween, obsessions with high school and exquisitely coiffed mullets. But then a friend from New York told me he called his in-the-womb baby Tiki and claimed, with no lack of enthusiasm, that it worked equally well for a boy or girl. (Tiki Barber plays in the NFL for the New York Giants. Guess which team is my friend’s favorite.)
Avajack couldn’t last forever. The day of the Big Ultrasound finally arrived. As the ultrasound technician checked for four heart chambers, a brain, kidneys, and so on, I watched the screen. My wife couldn’t see, and I’m glad. Avajack looked less like a baby and more like a gummi bear. The alternating emotions were ...
Near-blubbering: Five fingers! I see five fingers! Our baby’s got five fingers! Yes! YES!
Confusion: That’s what? How do you see that? Really? That’s the mouth? Seriously? To this day, I don’t know whether the ultrasound technician is honest or a major shyster.
Discomfiture: From the front, our baby looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I’m sorry, honey—it’s obviously my fault!
Do all parents wonder whether their baby might be ugly and they’ll never know, like the “breathtaking” baby on Seinfeld? True story: When my older brother was born, my grandmother took one look at his nose and said to my mother, “No matter how much it costs to fix, I’ll pay for it.”
All along, my wife and I were convinced that Avajack was a girl. A few minutes into the test, the technician started teasing us. “I see evidence of the gender,” she singsonged. That made me think boy. I thought the whole point of the ultrasound was to look for one specific organ (meaning, of course, the liver). If it’s there, boy; if it’s not, girl, so evidence must mean boy—and if the evidence is obvious immediately, he must be a healthy boy, if you know what I mean.
As it turns out, the proof of femaleness is more than just lack of maleness—and I don’t mean Avajack had a credit card, a Gucci bag and an enormous brain. There were three very straight, obvious white lines in that cloudy image ...
My mom—bearer of four boys, no girls, and still waiting for her first grandbaby—blubbered at the news. But she would’ve blubbered if we’d told her we were having a giraffe.
Now I couldn’t call our baby Avajack anymore. We needed a name. A real name. A girl’s name.
In the next few months, my wife and I brought up and shot down numerous serious contenders. I have one unbreakable rule: No names starting with the same sound as my last name. Every girl in my high school whose first and last name started with the same letter was a burnout. My wife has something against names that have to be shortened (such as, ahem, “Matt” from Matthew). We both wanted to walk the line between unique and trendy. Madison is great, but I know 47 of them, and that’s just in a two-block section of University City.
When my wife’s water broke, we were pretty sure on the name but not 100 percent. My wife wanted to wait to see her to make sure Whatshername looked like her name. (At that point, we were unaware that the only names our newborn would resemble were Pinky and Wrinkly, neither of which made it past our second round of cuts.)
When Whatshername entered the world, she entered it all at once. The same second I saw her front cheeks, I saw her back cheeks. It’s a moment frozen in time: her arms and legs fl ailing, the umbilical cord a miraculous and soon-to-be-cut bridge. The next moment is frozen in time, too: The nurse carried her to the warming table, and I got a look at my daughter’s face for the first time. She looked exactly like my dad.
Uh-oh. Emily wanted our daughter to look like her name. She would be the only little girl in all of St. Louis named Richard.
But I never mentioned this, and Emily never picked up on the resemblance. She saw a beautiful girl named Lily Grace Crossman.
When he’s not changing diapers, Matt Crossman writes about NASCAR and baseball for Sporting News.
