On "Eleri"

When Clio was born, we thought she would be a girl, and we thought she would be named Clara- just unusual enough, very pretty but not too sweet- but I took one look at her in the delivery room and said, I think her name is Clio. We debated for 24 hours (Violet and Alice were the other major contenders), but Clio she was and Clio she is and Clio she will be.

I remember once when she was about 15 months or so- she was walking stably but I was not yet pregnant with Eleri- we encountered another Clio, slightly older, at the pediatrician's office. The mother was up in arms; she acted as if I had taken something away from her and asked me, defensively, how I had come up with the name. (For the record, my friend Tim had an old friend named Clio who once offered to hire me in the photo department at Allure, where she was Photo Editor; her sister Isolde later hired me at Real Simple. I discovered only after the birth certificate was signed that that Clio's full name is Cliona, which is really Irish and very beautiful.) We were waiting for the same doctor and their appointment was first; when they came out the mother declared that Dr. Oppenheim had not two but THREE Clio's in her practice, and seemed to expect me to react in anger and alarm. I shrugged it off- my Clio is so thoroughly Clio, it doesn't much matter how many other kids share this same name.

With Eleri we've never been quite so certain. I have moments even now when I look at her and think, are you really Eleri? I had wanted Romy, and sometimes that seems right (though I had forgotten the Lisa Kudrow/ Mira Sorvino movie Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, which may have kept me off the name in the end.) Sometimes one of Clio's cast offs seems best: she could be an Alice. We also had some names on the list that seem appropriately solid and no frills in contrast to the musical Eleri, like Ada and Orly, both of which I still like. Maybe it's just the spelling: I never much liked names that ended in "i" but I loved that this was a celtic name. However, no one can pronounce it (which should be no surprise since ours is not the proper pronunciation of the Welsh name), and often people who haven't seen it written resort to the more common- or, I should say, the actual-spelling, Ellery.


And now, the name is, inexplicably, starting to pop up. An acquaintence in music class said her cousin just named her baby girl Ellery. On the Grey's Anatomy/ Private Practice cross-over event which coerced me to watch the latter for the first time (yes, I know that's exactly the audience-building intention of these cross-marketing endeavours; what can I say? I'm a sucker), a new mom was talking about the list of names she had picked out: "Lovely names like Sarah and Lila; and Ellery, which I had never heard before but I read it in a book and I thought it was so pretty." It is funny how these trends go: There were too many Emmas and Ellas and Elles, and even Elsies and Ellies and Evas and Eves, and somehow Ellery is related to those but still different enough.


And it's not that I need my chidren to have a completely unique name--I grew up Heather in the 1970s, for goodness sake--it's more that I worry that these other Ellery's will be so much more Ellery than mine. Hell, their names will even be spelled right.