What's In A Name?
When my own life has time to spare I live others' vicariously. One of my female friends is recently married to what seems from her description to be a throroughly chauvinist pig. I have never met him so I cannot confirm this. Even if she didn't love him it would be a little late for her to back out since of it since, yep, she's carrying his baby.
Yes "his" baby. It's a boy, see, and according to him, it is not only his right as the man to name the baby, it is his duty! Sexist? Naw!
My friend included a passage from a book called Wild at Heart by John Edlredge that she believes prompted his view and asked me to try to make sense of it for her because she doesn't get it. I'll include enough so you get the gist of it but not enough that I'll get sued for copying it.
I wrote to her:
If we are "personally, uniquely planned and created, knit together in our mother's womb by God himself," why -- when He is already doing this knitting in your uterus -- why can't he also be planting the kid's name into your brain while he's in the neighborhood? More simply: If He's using you to make the baby, why wouldn't He use you to name him?
By the way, although the Lord can work miracles (it's in His job description) it will make the knitting he's doing in your womb much easier if you remember to eat your recommended daily allowance of wool. Cotton and linen are also good supplements because you never know when God wants to knit a summer weight baby. Either that or you're going to birth a sweater. Congratulations! Now I see why a woman carrying a six pound baby can gain 40 pounds. There's a loom inside there! Who knew?
OK.
This stuff about the man having to name the male children is a bunch of hokum. I do have my father's name and I'm guessing it was his idea. But my mother named my two younger brothers. Hubby believing in his "right" to name the boy because he's the man doesn't surprise me since you told me how he flatly dismissed the idea of moving to accomodate your career while you were supposed to pick up and move to follow him to a job that will pay a fraction of what he makes now.
This next thought is competely none of my business to share but I will anyway. You have to settle whether you live in a marriage in which you're equal partners or one in which every time he stands up for something, he's exerting his rights as a man and every time you do it, you're acting childish. What happens once the baby is born? Are you supposed to give up your career and become a stay-at-home mom? That's as noble a profession as any if you choose it but it's darn near indentured servitude if you don't.
My take: A man needs to know his name? Fine. Until he figures it out, he can have one that his mother likes. Maybe you do it the way the President and the Senate fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. The President makes a nomination and the Senate votes yea or nay. You can let Hubby decide if he wants to be the President or the Senate.
But it should be decided like most everything else in a marriage should -- as something you do as a team.
Of course, wacky thoughts like that could explain why I'm still single.
Yes "his" baby. It's a boy, see, and according to him, it is not only his right as the man to name the baby, it is his duty! Sexist? Naw!
My friend included a passage from a book called Wild at Heart by John Edlredge that she believes prompted his view and asked me to try to make sense of it for her because she doesn't get it. I'll include enough so you get the gist of it but not enough that I'll get sued for copying it.
A man needs to know his name. He needs to know he’s got what it takes. And I don’t mean "know" in the modernistic, rationalistic sense. I don’t mean that the thought has passed through your cerebral cortex and you’ve given it intellectual assent, the way you know about the Battle of Waterloo or the ozone layer –the way most men “know” God or the truths of Christianity. I mean a deep knowing, the kind of knowing that comes when you have been there, entered in, experienced firsthand in an unforgettable way.
"Who can give a man this, his own name?" George MacDonald asks. "God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is." He reflects upon the white stone that Revelation includes among the rewards God will give to those who "overcome." On that white stone there is a new name. It is "new" only in the sense that it is not the name the world gave to us, certainly not the one delivered with the wound. But the new name is really not new at all when you understand that it is your true name, the one that belongs to you, "that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought throughout the long process of creation" and redemption. Psalm 139 makes it clear that we were personally, uniquely planned and created, knit together in our mother’s womb by God himself. He had someone in mind and that someone has a name.
I wrote to her:
If we are "personally, uniquely planned and created, knit together in our mother's womb by God himself," why -- when He is already doing this knitting in your uterus -- why can't he also be planting the kid's name into your brain while he's in the neighborhood? More simply: If He's using you to make the baby, why wouldn't He use you to name him?
By the way, although the Lord can work miracles (it's in His job description) it will make the knitting he's doing in your womb much easier if you remember to eat your recommended daily allowance of wool. Cotton and linen are also good supplements because you never know when God wants to knit a summer weight baby. Either that or you're going to birth a sweater. Congratulations! Now I see why a woman carrying a six pound baby can gain 40 pounds. There's a loom inside there! Who knew?
OK.
This stuff about the man having to name the male children is a bunch of hokum. I do have my father's name and I'm guessing it was his idea. But my mother named my two younger brothers. Hubby believing in his "right" to name the boy because he's the man doesn't surprise me since you told me how he flatly dismissed the idea of moving to accomodate your career while you were supposed to pick up and move to follow him to a job that will pay a fraction of what he makes now.
This next thought is competely none of my business to share but I will anyway. You have to settle whether you live in a marriage in which you're equal partners or one in which every time he stands up for something, he's exerting his rights as a man and every time you do it, you're acting childish. What happens once the baby is born? Are you supposed to give up your career and become a stay-at-home mom? That's as noble a profession as any if you choose it but it's darn near indentured servitude if you don't.
My take: A man needs to know his name? Fine. Until he figures it out, he can have one that his mother likes. Maybe you do it the way the President and the Senate fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. The President makes a nomination and the Senate votes yea or nay. You can let Hubby decide if he wants to be the President or the Senate.
But it should be decided like most everything else in a marriage should -- as something you do as a team.
Of course, wacky thoughts like that could explain why I'm still single.
posted by jack at 11:04 PM
1 Comments:
I don't think so. The child was a happy accident whom my friend thinks she conceived the night she and her now husband got engaged.
Despite the red flag she raised about who would move for whose career, she found enough positives to fall in love with him and believe she stay that way for the rest of her life.
The world is not perfect and, in most cases, neither is marriage.
Post a Comment
<< Home