Am I Wrong For Choosing The Baby’s Name Because I’m Carrying It? Real Parenting Talk
I was 26 weeks pregnant, folding tiny cotton onesies on our couch last week, my lumpy pregnancy pillow wedged between my side and the armrest, half a pack of cheddar Goldfish spilled next to my foot. My partner, Jake, was sitting next to me, scrolling through the same baby name list we’d had saved in our notes app for two months. “I still don’t get why you won’t give Hunter a chance,” he said, not looking up from his phone. “It’s my dad’s brother’s name, it means something to my family.” That’s when it slipped out, sharper than I meant it to be: “I’m the one carrying this baby. I get to pick the name.”
Jake went quiet, closed his phone, got up and walked to the kitchen to grab a beer without saying anything. I sat there staring at the pile of soft blue and yellow onesies, and immediately started second-guessing myself. Was I being unreasonable? Was I wrong to claim full control over something that’s supposed to be a joint decision?
To be fair, the fight wasn’t just about the name. I’d spent the first 20 weeks of this pregnancy with hyperemesis, throwing up three or four times a day, missing half my work days, losing 12 pounds before I started gaining any. Now I have pelvic girdle pain that makes it hard to walk to the mailbox some mornings, and I haven’t slept a full six hours straight in three months. The Hunter thing wasn’t just that I had a bully by that name in 10th grade who used to trip me in the hallway—though that alone was enough to make my skin crawl. It was that every time I said I hated it, Jake acted like I was being picky, like my discomfort was just a silly preference that didn’t count as much as his family legacy.
I texted my best friend Lila, who had a baby 18 months ago, and she wrote back two minutes later: “I said the exact same thing to Matt when we fought about our daughter’s name. I don’t think you’re wrong, but I also think I could have said it nicer.” That got me thinking. I’ve seen so much talk online about how baby naming has to be 50/50, that it’s both people’s baby, so both people get equal say. And that’s true, in the big picture. But what no one talks about is that equal doesn’t always look the same when one person is doing all the physical work.
For the last seven months, every part of my body has been public domain. Strangers touch my belly at the grocery store. My in-laws tell me I’m eating too much sugar. Doctors poke and prod me without always stopping to ask if I’m okay. I don’t get to opt out of any of the hard parts: the nausea, the back pain, the risk of stitches, the months of sleep deprivation coming after she’s born. So why would I not get extra say on the one thing that’s going to stick with her (and me) forever? That doesn’t make me a bad partner, that just makes me someone who’s carrying the whole physical load of this experience.
But that doesn’t mean Jake’s feelings didn’t matter. He’s already on the outside looking in a lot of the time—all the big changes are happening to my body, so it’s easy for him to feel like he has no meaningful role in the big decisions. My initial outburst didn’t just state my boundary, it shut him out entirely, which wasn’t what I actually wanted. That’s the mistake a lot of us make when we bring this up: we frame it as “you get no say” instead of “my say counts a little more because of what I’m going through.”
After 20 minutes of awkward quiet, I walked into the kitchen where he was leaning against the counter scrolling, and I rephrased it. “I know this is our baby, and your opinion matters. But I’m the one who lives in this body 24 hours a day right now, and I’ve had to give up so much control over everything that happens to me over the last seven months. The name is one thing I really need to have final say on. What if we do this: I pick the first name, you pick the middle name. I won’t complain about whatever middle name you pick, as long as you don’t complain about my first name.”
He thought about it for a minute, then nodded. Said that made sense, he just hadn’t looked at it that way before. He said he hated feeling like he had no part in the big decisions, but getting full say on the middle name felt fair. I’ve talked to three other pregnant friends since this fight, and they’ve all had similar disagreements, with different workable compromises. One couple does two vetoes for the birthing parent over any name the other proposes, no questions asked. Another decided that if they can’t agree before birth, the birthing parent gets the final tiebreaker after meeting the baby. The concrete line I used works for a lot of people, because it gives the non-birthing parent a clear, meaningful stake instead of shutting them out completely. You don’t have to demand everything or give everything up to honor your own experience.
Right now, our plan is set. I picked Elowen for the first name, which Jake thinks is a little out there but he’s stopped complaining about it. He picked Arthur for the middle name, after his great grandpa, which I actually kind of like. We still joke about it sometimes—he’ll tease that she’s going to go by her middle name and blame me for the “weird hippie first name” when she’s a teenager. I still have days where I wonder if I pushed too hard, if I should have compromised more. But then I wake up at 2 a.m. with a cramp in my calf, or I can’t put my own socks on, and I remember that this isn’t me being unreasonable. It’s me asking for my experience to be counted. We still have a month left before she’s due, and anything could change. Maybe when we meet her, we’ll both decide the name we picked doesn’t fit anyway. For now, this works for us.
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