I’ve always believed there was some kind of metaphysical woo-woo at work behind the scenes, guiding me to make the right decisions. Once, when I broke up with my partner and was deciding whether or not to fly home from Canada to Australia to win him back, I went to a pub. On the wall, there was a Christmas stocking with his last name on it. I saw it and booked a ticket the next day. We’re now happily married.
When it came to naming our kids, I waited for a sign before naming each one of them. It may sound weird and wacky, but it worked for us.
We used a baby name book in an unexpected way for our son
For our first child, my husband Sam and I borrowed a name book from a friend. There must have been at least 1000 names in there. But rather than endlessly flip through them looking for something we liked and making list after list, we decided to take a different approach. One night, we were sitting on the couch when my husband picked the book up. He dragged his thumb across the side of the book, stopped on a random page, then opened the book and looked down. It had landed on the “H” section.
The first name he read on the top left was “Harley.” Harley is a gender-neutral name (we kept the baby’s sex a surprise) of British origin. It’s derived from the Old English words hara, meaning “hare,” and leah, meaning “meadow.” My husband and I had recently moved back to Australia from London, and I liked the idea of giving our child a name with a UK connection. I also liked the fact that you couldn’t really shorten it to a nickname.
“Harley,” I repeated back. “I love it.”
When our son was born a few months later, I took one look at him and knew the name fit. We called him Harley and gave him the middle name Samuel, after my husband. He’s the only Harley at his school, and the name suits him to a tee.
For our first daughter, I got a sign while sitting on a beach
When I got pregnant with our second child three years later, I was so tempted to find out the sex. I was grateful for our son, but I was also absolutely desperate to have a girl. During an antenatal scan, I actually asked our sonographer to write down the sex on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope. But we never opened it. Deep down, I felt it would be peaking at one of life’s greatest surprises. And so, we waited patiently.
Toward the end of the pregnancy, I was on the beach talking to my tummy, asking the baby whether it was a boy or a girl. It was late afternoon, and the sun was setting across Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne, where we lived at the time.
By then, my husband and I had narrowed down our potential girl’s names, and “Isla” was at the top of the list. To help us come up with the list, we’d installed a baby-naming app on both of our phones, whereby you both swipe names you like and get alerts when you match on a name. We both liked Isla, which was gaining popularity around that time. Pronounced “eye-la,” I’d always thought the name sounded so pretty and gentle on the tongue.
Just as I asked the question and rubbed my bump, a mom nearby called out to her daughter, “Isla, Isla, there you are, I found you!” I knew right then that I would be having a girl and that her name would be Isla.
What’s even weirder is that when Isla was born, my husband wanted to call her Isla Kathleen after my mother, Linda Kathleen. The name Kathleen had been passed down four generations on my side of the family, starting with my great-grandmother Ethel Kathleen Conway and ending with my sister, Samantha Kathleen Townsend. I was hesitant, but he wanted to carry on the family tradition. In the hospital, one of the nurses asked what the baby’s name was, and we said, “Isla.”
She replied, “Oh, that’s so pretty. My friend has just called her daughter Isla Kathleen.” If I ever had any doubt about my strange belief in signs and cosmic happenstance, they were obliterated at that moment. Isla Kathleen, it was.
Our first daughter helped with our second daughter
When I was 37, I got pregnant with our third child unexpectedly. I’d always loved the name Lily, and one night, I was in the bath with my daughter Isla when I asked her what we should call the baby. “Lily,” she said, in her sweet little voice and without hesitation. “I think Lily would be the perfect name for her.”
I smiled and nodded, and when she arrived a few months later, I couldn’t agree more. We called her Lily Christina, after my mother-in-law, Betty Christina.
For me, choosing my babies’ names was one of the highlights of being pregnant. But with so many options, making a decision did feel overwhelming at times. A name is an enduring part of your child’s identity that they will (likely) carry forever, so you want to get it right. Luckily, I feel like the universe helped me with the process, and all of our children’s names suit them perfectly.
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