We’ve received some excellent questions through the Anonymous Question Box so far. I’ll be honest: some of them are hard. It’s going to take some time to figure out the legal stuff, for example, and it’s something we definitely need to do soon. We promise to let you know as soon as we wrap our heads around it ourselves.
In the meantime, I’d like to answer a pair of questions about names. No, not for our non-existent baby-being – for this blog and for E and me.
1) Where’d you get the name “Baby, Plan Your Birth”?
Whoa! Be so excited! I’m about to introduce you to the coolest baby board books ever. (Okay, tied with Go The F#@k to Sleep.) Lisa Brown’s Baby Be Of Use series is a set of six board books that suggest your baby start pulling his or her weight around the house. Titles include Baby, Do My Banking and Baby, Fix My Car. We thought we’d take it a step further and increase expectations for fetuses, too.
2) What will your child(ren?) call you? Is there a special name for genderqueer parents?
E is thinking “Mom” with an option for “Mama” when the wee one is at its most wee.
I don’t really self-identify as female, so you’re right that Mom/Mum/Mama/Mommy/Mumsy/Motherdearest are not quite right. But neither are the Dad set of monikers. And I’m not into having the kid call me by my first name.
We actually poked around the web awhile ago to see what the other female-bodied genderqueer parents do. We found that a lot of people (usually white people living in English-speaking households) go with “Baba” because it fits into that pattern of repeated baby sounds (e.g., Mama, Dada, Papa) but doesn’t necessarily connote a specific gender since it means “grandmother” in some languages and “father” in others. But those baba=father languages include Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), which is a problem in a country where much of the population speaks Chinese. It also sounds too much like “bubba,” which means “baby” in much of the Anglo-speaking world.
Other people intentionally used words that mean “father” in other languages, but that didn’t click for me. I don’t identify as a father, whether it’s in English or in Māori. We kept looking.
Eventually, we came across a blog post (that I can’t seem to find now) about a polyamorous family that included a man who was not genetically related to the child. His name was Daniel (I think), but the kid couldn’t pronounce that and called him Dabo instead. The name stuck.
My name isn’t Daniel. There is no context for calling me Dabo, but after E teasingly called me Dabo a few times, I started getting really fond of it. It has a pleasing sound. It feels good in my mouth. It means, variously, “bread,” “gold,” and “I give.”
I’m aware that Dabo would be a strange choice. It would probably just confuse people and anger the ones who get pissy when people make up names. But that’s the best we’ve got at the moment.
Or maybe I’ll just reverse-engineer the claim that the baby’s first word was my name by naming myself whatever the child’s first word is. (Fast forward to the kid’s 17th birthday, when he’s still calling me Duckduck.) What do you think? No, seriously. We don’t actually have an answer, and we’re open to suggestions.
-H
Baby, plan your birth! 