What's in a name

I know. Inarú Isabel Beatriz Correa is quite a name for such a little girl. And if we were to be really traditional, you could tag on Garcia at the end of her name, too.

Little do people realize, Adal and I have been arguing over the name for years, even before the idea of having a baby entered our minds. He likes Taino names like Atabex, Guabancex, and names in literature like Dulcinea (Quijote), Beatrice (Dante's Inferno). And I like pretty names in Italian (Arabella), French (Babette), or Spanish (Isabela), or things like Luna, Maya, India, Diana. Being both hard-headed and stubborn, we had a hard time finding a middle ground.

I usually cave in to whatever Adal wants. Because I want to make him happy and nothing is worth fighting that much about anyway, and, bottom line, I like to indulge him. But I was not budging on this issue. After all, this was not about me. This was about another human being carrying the weight of her name throughout life. Funny enough, if it was a boy, we both agreed on Dante (him for the literature aspect, me because it was a handsome name). But a girl! She would be forever judged by her name. Now, I don't hate my name, but something easier to pronounce would have been easier in life (and I get Mr. Garcia a lot).

We both wanted to honor Adal's mother who had passed away 6 years ago. Unfortunately, her name was Dorcas. A beautiful name, but murder on the elementary school playground for my little girl. Basically, we had nothing to start on.

As soon as the pregnancy test came back positive, I started searching all the baby name websites on the internet. I looked at Arabic names, Spanish names, Latin names, French names, top ten names of last year, and very little drew my attention. I had always liked Isabella, with two L's. But lately it seemed that everyone was naming little girls Isabela or Isabel, and Adal wasn't quite sold either. So I came up with a plan.

I made a list. I looked on the internet for a Taino dictionary, and wrote down all the words or names that I liked, omitting the ones that had undesirable meanings like "shifty eyes" or "white juice from the yuca". I picked the ones I most liked and brought it down to four choices, then I let Adal pick. Then I made another list, of the "western" names I most liked, narrowed it down to like 8, and let Adal tell me which of those he liked. Then I started playing around with the order of the two types of names. That's how I came up with Inarú Isabel. It had a good ring. And then I gave birth.

Adal always liked Beatriz because it was the name of the woman Dante went to hell and back for. So he would joke that the baby's name would be Inarú Beatriz (not a great ring to it). But that wouldn't be fair to me, where I would have had no input. So as we were filling out the birth certificate in the hospital, and Adal is holding Inarú close to him, he looks at me with his puppy eyes and says "add Beatriz to the name, puh-leeeze???", and maybe it was the hormones or that seeing Adal with the baby held tight softened my heart, I caved. So that's how Inarú ended up having Isabel Beatriz as her middle names.

I know we probably made a big deal about it, more than we should have. But we may not have any other children and this one may be the only one we both get to name, and that's why it was a big deal to us.

So what do we call her now? The baby.