My SIL announced at my daughter’s birthday party that if they have a girl, he wants to name her “Renee”, his late wife’s name. My daughter just sat there. She looked like she’d been slapped. I told him that’s not something we can just accept. But then his second idea was somehow even worse. He said, “What if we …
The Party Was Already Half Over When He Did It
It was a Saturday. End of October, so we’d dragged everything inside – the balloon arch, the little cake table, the paper plates with the gold rims that my daughter had been so pleased about finding on sale. Thirty-two years old and she still wanted her birthday to feel like a birthday. I love that about her.
There were maybe fourteen people there. Her friends, a few cousins, my sister Donna, my husband Carl. And Marcus, her husband, who’d been quieter than usual all afternoon. I noticed it but didn’t say anything. He gets quiet sometimes. I figured work.
Carly – my daughter – was opening cards at the kitchen table when Marcus cleared his throat.
He didn’t stand up. Didn’t tap a glass. He just said it, conversationally, like he was mentioning the weather.
“We found out the sex today, actually. It’s still early, so we weren’t going to say anything yet. But.” He paused. “We think it might be a girl.”
The room did what rooms do. Everyone made the noise. Donna grabbed Carly’s arm. Someone said oh my God. I was already tearing up because I’m a grandmother-in-waiting and I have no self-control.
And then Marcus kept talking.
“I’ve been thinking about names,” he said. “If it is a girl. And I keep coming back to Renee.”
The noise stopped.
Not all at once. It kind of drained out of the room, the way water goes when you pull a plug. Donna’s hand was still on Carly’s arm but Carly had gone very still.
Renee was Marcus’s first wife. She died four years ago. Ovarian cancer, brutal and fast, eleven months from diagnosis to the end. He and Carly got together about two years after. I know that history. I respect that history. I have never once asked him to pretend it doesn’t exist.
But Renee.
What My Daughter’s Face Did
Carly didn’t cry. She didn’t say anything. She just sat there with a half-opened birthday card in her hands and her face went somewhere else entirely.
I know my daughter’s face. I’ve known it for thirty-two years. I know the face she makes when she’s hurt versus the face she makes when she’s angry. I know the face she made at seven when she fell off her bike and didn’t want anyone to see, and the face she made at nineteen when her first real boyfriend ended things and she tried to pretend she was fine.
This was the seven-year-old face. The don’t-look-at-me face.
Someone – I think it was her friend Paulette – said something about it being a beautiful name, and that broke the silence, and the room started moving again, but Carly just set the card down on the table and looked at her hands.
Marcus was watching her. He knew. Of course he knew.
I gave it about four minutes. Then I said, quietly, to no one in particular, that I needed to check on something in the kitchen, and I looked at Marcus and he followed me.
What I Said to Him
I’m not a confrontational person. Carl will tell you that. My sister Donna will tell you that, loudly, with examples. I tend to go around things rather than through them.
But I’m also a mother.
“Marcus,” I said, once we were in the kitchen with the door mostly closed, “I need you to help me understand what just happened out there.”
He looked tired. He’s been looking tired for months, which I’ve attributed to the pregnancy, to the stress of it, to the fact that they’d had two losses before this one took. He’s not a bad man. I want to be clear about that because it matters for everything that comes after.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said. “Renee was important to me. She was my wife. I don’t want to just – I don’t want her to be gone completely.”
“I understand that,” I said. And I did. I genuinely did.
“But this is Carly’s child too. This is Carly’s daughter. And you announced it at her birthday party, Marcus. In front of everyone she knows.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought it would be easier. With people around.”
I had to take a breath at that one.
“Easier for who?”
He didn’t answer.
“What you’re asking,” I said, “is for your wife to raise a daughter with the name of your first wife. To say that name every single day. To call it across a playground. To write it on school forms. To hear other people say it. I’m not saying your grief isn’t real. I’m saying that’s not something we can just accept and move on from. That’s something that needs an actual conversation.”
He nodded. He looked like he knew I was right and hated it.
And then he said: “What if we used it as a middle name?”
I thought about that for about three seconds.
“That’s better,” I said. “That’s a real compromise. But that’s still a conversation you need to have with Carly. Not here. Not today.”
He nodded again.
Then he said: “Actually, I had another idea too.”
The Second Idea
I should have seen it coming. I don’t know why I didn’t.
“What if,” Marcus said, “we named her Renee, but called her by a nickname? Something totally different. So Carly gets to call her whatever she wants day-to-day, but the name is still there. On the birth certificate.”
I stared at him.
He kept going. “Like, a lot of people go by middle names, or nicknames, their whole lives. The legal name doesn’t have to be the everyday name. Carly could pick the nickname herself. Whatever she wants.”
“Marcus.”
“It’s just an idea.”
“You’re describing a situation where your daughter’s legal name is your late wife’s name, but your current wife gets to call her something else so she doesn’t have to think about it.”
He started to say something.
“That’s not a compromise,” I said. “That’s a filing system.”
He went quiet.
“The name on the birth certificate is her name. That’s what goes on every document for the rest of her life. That’s what people use when they’re being formal or serious. That’s what a teacher says when she’s in trouble. You can’t just paper over that with a nickname and call it a solution.”
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside I could hear the party trying to restart itself, Donna’s laugh too loud and deliberate, someone putting music on.
“I love Renee,” he said. Not defensively. Just flat. “I loved her. I don’t know how to not want to honor that.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to stop loving her. But you have a living wife. Who is pregnant with your child. Who just found out she’s having a daughter at her own birthday party, in front of all her friends, and the first thing you did with that information was tell her you want to name the baby after your first wife.”
He put his hands over his face.
“I didn’t think about it like that,” he said.
What Happened When We Went Back Out
Carly had moved to the couch. She was talking to Paulette about something, smiling, doing the thing she does where she puts the hurt in a box and deals with it later. She’s been doing that since she was small. I’ve never decided if it’s a strength or a problem.
Marcus sat down next to her. I watched from across the room.
He didn’t say anything dramatic. He just took her hand. She let him. That’s something, I thought.
The party wound down the way parties do. People hugged Carly, said congratulations again about the baby, said nothing more about the name. Donna caught my eye on her way out and raised her eyebrows and I gave her the smallest shake of my head that meant later.
Carl helped me clean up. He’d been in the other room for most of it and I gave him the short version while we loaded the dishwasher.
“Renee?” he said.
“Renee.”
He was quiet for a minute. “What did Marcus say when you talked to him?”
“He had a backup plan that was worse.”
Carl put a cup in the wrong rack and didn’t fix it. “What are they going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “That part’s not mine to decide.”
Where It Stands Now
Carly called me three days later. Tuesday morning, I remember because I was still in my robe and the coffee hadn’t finished.
She said they’d talked. A real conversation this time, just the two of them, after she’d had a few days to get her head straight. She said Marcus had cried. She said she’d cried. She said she understood, more than she wanted to, why he needed to hold onto Renee’s name somewhere.
“But not as her name,” Carly said. “I can’t do that. I told him I can’t spend the next eighteen years saying that name and meaning our daughter and also meaning her. They’d get tangled up. I’d lose track of which grief was which.”
Which grief was which. She said it like it was obvious, like it was a practical problem, and I suppose it is. My daughter has been quietly managing the grief of marrying a widower for two years now and she’s never once complained to me about it.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said okay.”
“Just okay?”
“He said he needed to think about it more. But okay for now.” She paused. “They might use it as a middle name. We haven’t decided. I’m not – I’m not totally against that. I just needed it off the table as a first name.”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“He shouldn’t have done it at the party.”
“No.”
“I think he thought I’d be less likely to react badly in public.” She said it without anger, which somehow made it worse. “Which worked, I guess. I didn’t react badly.”
“You didn’t react at all,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I know,” she said. “I’m working on that.”
The baby’s due in April. They still haven’t settled on a name. Carly sent me a list last week – seven names, none of them Renee, all of them good. Marcus apparently added two of his own to the bottom of the list.
One of them was her grandmother’s name. His grandmother. A woman named Dot, apparently, who raised him after his parents split and who died the year before Renee did.
Carly texted me separately about that one.
He wants to call her Dot, she wrote.
Then: I actually kind of love it.
Then: Don’t tell him I said that yet.
—
If this one hit close to home, pass it along to someone who gets it.
If you’re in the mood for more wild family drama, you won’t believe how this person discovered My Father Was Supposed to Be Dead. Then He Came Through My Trauma Bay. or the lengths this spouse went to when they Caught My Wife With the Tutor. And for another unbelievable twist of fate, read about the surgeon whose own Father Came In as a John Doe.
