Zara Hope

As most of you who read this blog know, I changed my name from Amanda to my middle name, Elizabeth, when I was nine. I was quite adamant that Amanda was not the right name for me and I begged my parents for a long time to let me change it. When we moved to Poway the summer between third and fourth grades, my parents consented to the name change and I started to introduce myself as Lizzie.

So when it came to thinking of a name for our baby, I felt no small amount of anxiety and trepediation. It's a big responsibility to name another human being and to pick the name that is right for them. I really wanted to find a name that had great meaning or that had a connection to our ancestry and a name that our child could be proud of. I didn't want to pick some uber trendy name or just some name that I happened to like. I needed to be able to tell my child exactly why they were named what they were and why I had chosen that name above all others.

In the early months of my pregnancy, I found the right name. For a boy. When David and I started talking about names, we discovered that we had both chosen the same name for a boy but we had no names for a girl. That, among many other significant experiences, had us convinced that we were going to have a boy. So it came as something as a shock when at our first ultrasound the technician guessed that we were going to have a girl. They couldn't quite tell since the baby's bum was turned toward us, her legs were closed and the umbilical cord was in between her legs. Since we got no clear view of the baby--and the guess was only that, a guess--it was easier for David and I to just think of our baby's gender as a mystery and wait until the baby's birth to know for sure. For the next two months, I was still convinced I was having a boy, but by the end of my pregnancy, I did start to feel that we were having a girl so it seemed like a good idea to start thinking of some girl names.

But we had nothing. Neither David nor I could think of any names that we really liked. We had a small list of names that were just okay, but nothing we were really sold on. One day, as I was reading in The Book of Mormon (I don't remember where, probably in Helaman or 3 Nephi) I came across several verses that talked about the city of Zarahemla. For Mormons, it's a recognizable name, but not so much for non-Mormons. As I was reading about Zarahemla, I thought, "Zarahemla.....Zara....I kind of like that name." Because of the way Zarahemla is pronounced, I say Zara like Sara or Kara with a "Z". Most people pronounce Zara like Car-a or Zar-a. I'm fine with either pronunciation.

I Googled the name Zara and discovered that it has Arabic roots and can mean shining, radiance, desert flower or princess; all meanings that I loved. Zara went to the top of our small list of potential girl names. In the last two weeks of my pregnancy (during the inducement dramas), I became more convinced that my baby was girl and that her name was Zara. I was pretty sold on the name before she was born and luckily, it was David's favorite name too. Shortly after she was born, both David and I decided that Zara would be her name.

The middle name, however, took a lot longer to decide on. We toyed around with the name Colleen, after David's mom (it's her middle name) or Mae, after my great-grandmother Leavitt (her name was Bertha Mae) but neither seemed to fit. I had also suggested names like Grace, Faith, Hope, and Charity because I love what they mean and I think we could use a little bit more of each of those virtues in our world.

David left the hospital late on the 31st to go home to feed Suyom and get some sleep. He called me when he got home and said, "Hope. I'm thinking maybe Hope should be her middle name. Let's think about it." The next morning, when David returned to the hospital, he once again suggested Hope as her middle name. "Our children are our hope for the future, after all," said David. And I couldn't agree more. And so her name became Zara Hope. Our radiant hope for the future and our little princess.

I like it. I hope she does too.