Strippers Are Daughters Too

My first attempt at naming our daughter did not go over well.  

I was at my in-laws' house drinking beer with my brother-in-law in the basement. Lucky for me, her family likes to drink beer. They live in Wisconsin, after all. You know how it is going to the in-laws. You have to be on your best behavior; you can never relax. Beer makes the time go by a little easier.

So her brother keeps talking about this friend who might be coming over. After about 12 beers and hearing the name a few times, I sprint upstairs and announce to Brooke and her mom that I have found the perfect name for our daughter.

“Blair has a friend with the name Sequin. I think that would be a great name for the baby.”

Silence.

My wife looks at me with that “How did I ever let this person impregnate me?” look.

Her mom looks at me with that “I KNEW this guy was not the right guy for my daughter” look.

“We will NOT name our daughter that,” Brooke says. “She will not be a stripper.”

“Blair doesn’t have a friend named Sequin,” her mom advises. “He has a friend named Seekman.”

In my drunkenness, I had apparently mistaken this guy’s last name for Sequin. My wife takes my beer from me and says it would be a good idea for me to stay upstairs with her for awhile.

Thus began my quest to name our daughter. I want something unusual and pretty. I don’t want her to be one of six Emmas or Madisons in her class.

Sequins are pretty and that name is unusual. She’d be the only girl in the school with that name.

But nooo, my wife, who has never been to a strip club in her life, thinks it sounds like a stripper name. She thought the same of some of my other choices, such as Tiffany and Layla.

Look, babies aren’t pre-destined by their names. You name a boy Mason, he isn’t necessarily going to lay bricks for a living. Jordans aren’t all going to play basketball. LeBrons…well, yeah, he’ll probably be a jerk and crap all over his hometown.

My point is, you can’t rule a name out because someone has chosen it as her stage name as she shakes her ta-tas to pay her way through college.

But that is what we do. My wife is a teacher. The name of ANY bad or obnoxious student she has ever encountered was immediately ruled out. I ruled out the names of stalker women from my past. Some of you are probably reading this post right now. THE COURT ORDER IS STILL IN  EFFECT!

Picking a name is more a process of elimination than anything.

I wanted our kid to have a BR name. Brian, Brooke and…? Moreover, both Brooke and I now have the same middle and last initials. We could all be BGG.

Brooke doesn’t like it. “You are boxing me in. Then we’d have to name our next child like that, too.”

And that’s a problem because…? Alliteration is clearly not a priority for her.

Brooke liked names that seemed old fashioned to me, like Annabelle and Clara. I liked hip names, like Roxy and Diamond and Sapphire and Kardashian.

You know, I probably haven’t been to a strip club in 15 years. I swear on my grandma’s grave.

In the end, we decided on a middle name first. Grace. Very classy. Never met a Grace I didn’t like.

First names were narrowed down to a few favorites. Claire, Chloe, Rosalee, Cecilly, Adrienne, Sydney. I didn’t really like Adrienne. I just let me wife put it on the list because, by this point, she was very short-tempered with me. When she gets upset and wants me to do something, she plays the labor card. “Do you know how hard it is going to be to push this baby out? It is the equivalent of you trying to pass a bowling ball.” OUUUCH.

I don’t know Brooke’s reasoning behind picking Sydney, but I had sound thinking behind mine. I was a huge fan of the television show Alias and fell in love with Jennifer Garner. She played an international spy named Sydney. In my mind, “Sydney” is associated with a super-hot chick who dresses in costumes to take down bad men and make the world around her a better place.

Sort of like a stripper.

 

Parental Advisory: Dirty Words Below

I know I am posting a lot. But I am trying to catch you up on the past eight months. Soon, I will have nothing more to say, or I will be too busy with the kid, and I will only post when something important happens. Do they have wi-fi in the delivery room?

One of the themes of this pregnancy has been “Brian isn’t excited enough.”

This mostly comes from my wife, but a few other people, too. It seems that since I don’t jump around every day like a Price is Right contestant, I am not really excited about being a dad.

As I’ve gotten older, excitement seems to be an emotion I experience less and less. Anger: Yeah, I can go Kanye West on someone in a minute. My grandma once tried to get me to switch from alcohol to water at a wedding where I had a little too much. The words “F-You and grandma” should never be used in the same sentence.

Sympathy/sadness: I cry at Hallmark commercials. The other night, I watched Marley and Me and bawled like John Boehner.

Excitement? Yeah, every now and then. When I got married. When I win a huge pot in poker. When my wife makes meatloaf. 

I’m excited about having a daughter. But that excitement is tempered with thoughts of sleepless nights, training bras, fending off lustful boys and paying for college. People call me a pessimist. I call me a realist. I always look at all sides of an issue.

Anyway, because I haven’t pinned the ultrasound picture to my chest and strapped myself to the fountain on Fountain Square, my wife feels I might not be excited enough. She even said that I should be more like my brother.

Now let me tell you about my brother. His name is Richard. But for the sake of this blog, we will call him Little Dick. This is his name because our dad was also named Richard and everyone called him Big Dick. They did this because he was a big guy, like me, and because he grew up in a time when it was commonplace to call people named Richard by the nickname Dick. He was well known, and it was not uncommon for us to go places around my hometown of Massillon, Ohio and hear people yell “Big Dick!” Like they used to do with Norm on Cheers. It made for some weird looks from the ladies

How could this have ever been acceptable? As far as I know, dick has been a slang term for penis forever. So how was it ever acceptable for Dick to be a good name for a young boy? Do you think the first Richard to ever be called Dick was just a big-time jerk and everywhere he went people called him that and it stuck, causing every Richard thereafter to bear that burden?

Can you imagine preparing for your son’s baptism and telling people, “This is Christopher, but we call him Cock.” The only person smiling would be the Catholic priest. How about introducing your daughter to the teacher as Tina “Tits” McGee? What were people thinking?

So Little Dick (If you ever see him, call him that. He likes it.) had a son about three years ago. Great kid named Landon. But before Landon comes along, my brother reads every parenting magazine you can imagine. He checks out books by the ton. He is super dad. Every conversation he has is about his son. “Little Dick, do you have any aspirin? I have a headache.” “Brian, did you know a newborn baby's head accounts for about one-quarter of its entire weight?”

After the kid is born, it gets worse. One day I visit him and I am sitting on his living room couch. I decide to count the pictures of his son just within my eyesight. 75. People think I am lying when I tell this story. I swear on my grandma’s grave. (Yes, the same grandma who tried to cut me off!)

That 75 number takes on some significance because, at Christmas, Landon also got 75 presents. My brother was buying three pairs of Nikes in three different sizes so his son could rock a color-coordinated outfit and have room to grow at all times.

He is a tremendous dad, but to say he is obsessed is an understatement. So, when my wife says, “You should be more like your brother,” I know what she means. I counter with, “You should be more like Megan  Fox. Or Jennifer Garner. Or Penelope Cruz. Or that Nasty Nikki in that Prince song.”

Ok, I really don’t do that. I might be 45, but I am not ready for dentures.

I haven’t glanced at one parenting magazine. If something goes wrong with my kid, I can Google it. Kid turns green? Punch “baby is turning green” into Google and I will have every answer I need. Most likely, someone rubbed cheap copper all over her or she rolled around in daddy’s secret stash of “parsley.”

I’m not going to match my brother. The truth is, I can only be me. I am EXCITED about my daughter. Price as Right EXCITED!!!! But I will approach her like I do everything else in life…by examining all angles, weighing pros and cons and planning for a successful outcome.

That works with kids, right?