He/She Names

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had already decided that if the baby was a boy his name would be Daegan.  I worked in childcare as an undergraduate and Daegan was a two-year-old boy with soft brown curls and large golden-brown doe eyes.  He was adorable and I wanted one just like him.

My husband and I knew that having a baby would be enough excitement and found out at 20 weeks that she was a girl.  With “Daegan” out of the running, we needed to come up with something else.  My favorite author in high school was Carson McCullers, a woman from the 1940’s who published several books and hung out with people like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. This name sounded pretty cool, so, we settled on it as the name for our little girl: Carson.

Due to her name and the fact that she didn’t have any hair until around the age of four, Carson was constantly mistaken for a boy.  It didn’t really bother me.  I had, and still have, a strong aversion to placing bows around the heads of small babies just to make it easier on others to identify their sex.  It never made me angry when she was mistaken for a boy, but it did make me laugh. Funniest, was when she would be wearing a pink dress and pink tights and someone would ask what the baby’s name was, and after we said, “Her name is Carson,” they would ask how old he is.

 Since naming our daughter Carson, we have met one boy named Carson and seven girls.  Still, the name Carson is most definitely associated with boys.  Throughout her childhood, doctors and dentists calling for appointment reminders would say, “This is a call just to let you know Carson has an appointment with so-and-so on Thursday May 10^th.  He will need to be there ten minutes early.”

When I call the doctor or pharmacy for my daughter, as soon as they hear or see the name Carson, they immediately shift to he. 

Since my daughter is now almost twenty, I don’t get those calls anymore, but the last call I took was the best way to end an era of he/she confusion.  The gynecologist office called to let me know that his pap smear was normal.