Raising Cubby Read Online Free PDF Page A

working on the house. She had a million things to do to make room for a baby. There was a crib to acquire, furniture to set up, and diapers and blankets to stockpile. She did most of those things herself, but there was one important task we did together: thinking of a name for our soon-to-be baby.
    We didn’t know if we would have a boy or a girl, so we decided to be prepared with names for either. I was shocked and mildly amused to find that there was actually a thriving industry selling guides to baby naming. I did everything on my own, so the idea that we’d buy a baby name in a bookstore seemed vaguely ridiculous to me. Yet there the books sat, prominently displayed in the parenting section. I looked at a few of those published suggestions, but they weren’t for me. I sensed that the best names were not in books at all.
    For example, if we ended up with a girl, I favored naming her Thugwena, because I knew a girl named Thugwena would be tough and not hassled by bullies. Thugwena is a strong, forceful name. Germanic, even. Lillian or Anne had nothing on Thugwena. Infact, if they were to meet Thugwena in a dark alley one night far in the future, they would surely turn and run.
    Little Bear didn’t like that idea much at all. “That sounds like a truck driver’s name,” she said. I wondered what was wrong with truck drivers. She preferred a name from our family tree, like Mary, Alice, or Carolyn. I thought those choices were too common. But most of all, I thought we should have a boy, and to encourage that, I concentrated on male names. After all, I was a man, and I assumed my kid would be a little version of me. I never even considered that Little Bear might feel exactly the same way and expect a little girl. I decided to proceed with positive thinking and plan for the arrival of a son.
    As everyone knows, the male version of Thugwena is Thugwald, but Little Bear rejected that fine manly name out of hand just as quickly. She also rejected Butch, Spike, Godfrey, and Bertrand. Fine country monikers like Zeke or Juke were unacceptable to her too. I wanted a strong, self-reliant sort of name, like Zeus or Thor, but she didn’t like those either. It seemed like we couldn’t agree on anything.
    She even rejected my functional choices. He would outgrow Baby pretty fast, but Kid seemed perfectly suitable, and admirably descriptive, to me. She wouldn’t even consider it. “What about Boy?” I suggested. “You can’t name a kid Boy,” she said without ever telling me why.
    From my perspective, refined names like Ascot, Geoffrey, or Clive were nonstarters. Luckily, Little Bear didn’t have any more enthusiasm for those names than me. We thought about John or Ed, our own fathers’ names, but we both rejected them. Our rocky childhoods were a little too clear in memory for either of us to honor our fathers in that way. And neither of us liked Wyman, my maternal grandfather’s name.
    But there was one name we both liked: Jack, my dad’s father’s name. He had died a few years before and he’d meant a whole lot tome. He was always the one person who’d believed in me as a kid, and he’d taught me about many things, including fine clothes and cars. When I was learning to drive, my parents grudgingly let me drive their Chevy Vega. Jack let me drive his Cadillac. He taught me how to work a shotgun and how to operate farm machinery. While everyone else said I was a failure, he was proud of me and said I was special.
    Little Bear knew all that, and she liked Jack too. We’d both been sad when he died. Finally, we had a name we could agree on. We would have a boy, and we would name him Jack. And that was what happened. But I could not leave well enough alone. Before the ink was even dry on the birth certificate, I had renamed our tyke.
    I knew Kid was unacceptable, and Child was no good either because he would outgrow it in short order. Luckily, I had one name in reserve, and it proved perfect: Bear Cub. I called his mom