Last Tuesday was “bring a guest to school day” at my daughter’s preschool. As parents gathered to participate in the festivities, an Asian man popped his head into my daughter’s classroom, clearly trying to find his child’s room. The assistant teacher looked up from the group and called out to the man, “Are you looking for Jet?” “No,” the man said, “I’m looking for Abby.”

“Oh,” the teacher said, slightly stymied. “Check across the hall.”

Immediately, I wanted to burst into fits of laughter! First of all, I imagined telling Jet’s mom the story and watching as she threw her head back, dying with laughter herself. You see, Jet is Korean-American (thus the teacher’s assumption about who the Asian man was looking for), and his parents are Caucasian. I knew this exchange would really tickle his mom—and she reacted exactly as predicted. Secondly, I thought it was so funny that the man said, “I’m looking for Abby”! Abby?! The name “Abby” strikes me as so entirely “whitebread” that his daughter being named Abby seemed about as silly in that moment as his being Jet’s Dad had struck me a moment earlier! Don’t get me wrong; I adore the name Abby! I truly do! And I don’t in any way think that people shouldn’t cross ethnic lines when naming their children. In fact, the thing that made this situation so deliciously laughable was that it challenged every preconceived notion one might have about families and naming.

Yesterday, in fact, our daughter’s name—as “ethnic” as it is, and as perfectly as it matches her face—announced her arrival at a birthday partly before she had a chance to do it herself. When she arrived at the rather large party (I suspect there were more than 50 kids there), she stopped at the check-in table where the birthday girls’ grandmother was handing out name tags. The grandmother looked at “Sunshine” and asked, “You’re [Hispanic name]?” while simultaneously peeling the name tag off the sheet of prepared labels. Sunshine exclaimed, “Yes!” while I joked that the mother was very efficient to have had the name tags ready to go because I thought I was going to have to spell Sunshine’s name (as is typical) in order for her to write out the name tag!

Names are a hot button issue in the adoption community because children who are placed for adoption some time after birth come with names, and adoptive parents are divided about whether children’s original names should be maintained post-adoption. Some argue that they should be maintained as part of children’s birth histories, while others argue that adoptive parents should have the same rights and responsibilities to name their children as anyone else. Strive and I fall somewhere in the middle, believing that it is important to maintain at least part of a child’s original name while adding something that makes it personally meaningful. This is a popular approach because it allows parents to choose a common name that is more American in cases where the birth name is very difficult to spell and/or pronounce.

When Sunshine was just an infant, my husband and I debated whether we should “Americanize” her birth name. He wondered if people would make negative assumptions about her because her name is decidedly Hispanic, if it would be too difficult to pronounce, too difficult to spell, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t want to hear any of it! It is a beautiful name and to look at her is to believe that she has the name that is perfect for her!

People would have to learn to deal with it—and they have, for the most part. I admit that it has taken some training, but it has been worth the effort.

Most parents would agree that naming a child is very personal matter – even though loads of people offer unsolicited opinions about baby names, both before and after they have been chosen! Plenty of people have asked me for a nickname to use for Sunshine, but I have encouraged them to use her full name instead, explaining that, with practice, they will be able to say it with ease! I’ve provided teachers with phonetic pronunciation keys at the start of the preschool year the last two years to help them out, and both years the teachers have said that they have found my cheat-sheets helpful.

The most amazing comments I’ve gotten are from people (yes, more than one) who have quite brazenly told me that Sunshine’s first and last names “don’t match” since the first is Hispanic and the last is Irish! Guess what, people?! I’ve noticed! And guess what else? Your vote doesn’t count! It’s a done deal! To both people who made this observation, I laughed and replied that I love her full name for precisely that reason: it fully reflects her family heritage. And what could be more “American” than a name like hers?!

There are those people who can’t bring themselves to use her Hispanic name (it can be shortened and Americanized quite easily in one fell swoop), but I think it’s because they’re too lazy to say a four-syllable name when they can get by with two. I continue to use Sunshine’s full name in their presence, time and time again (year after year!) and I continue to use it exclusively in all written correspondence, but they resist.

We all have visceral reactions to certain names because, in many cases, they remind us of people we’ve known. That we get to expand the list of possibilities by integrating another culture’s names into our own adds dimension and excitement to the process!

And speaking of excitement…imagine my excitement when I realized that I was right about something today! A quick search of the origin of the name Abby reveals that the name first came into use in Britian during the 16^th century and under Puritan influence. You can’t get much more “whitebread” than that!