At school, I decided on Ben. The name I would call my son. Taking inspiration from the sword-and-sandals epic Ben-Hur, I reasoned that, with my surname, a heroic quality might be bestowed upon the young Ben Hersey. Here, at 12, between games of Subbuteo and playbacks of INXS on my Aiwa sound system, the decision had already started to weigh on me.
By the time I’d left university, Ben had dropped out of sight, joining the likes of Olly, Toby and Dom in a sizeable category my mum might call “a bit drippy”.
I became set on Jack. Simple, strong and, being my own middle name, a somewhat stealthy ego trip. Coming from a family with no traditions at all, I liked the idea that it might pass through generations and generations to come. Then my sister nicked it for one of her kids. The Jack era had ended before it began.
George then. Yes. When I got married, my wife and I both liked George. But Prince George appeared and we imagined the world would soon be awash with Georges, that shouting George in the park would cause herds of kids to assemble in dangerous numbers. Nearly a decade on, this George epidemic is yet to materialise.
Importantly, it took a while for a kid in need of a name to actually appear.
When it finally did, we embraced the idea of not finding out if it was a boy or a girl. Surely, we thought, this was one of the few happy surprises an adult human has left to experience in life, up there with the moment you return from holiday with both AirPods. I would dispute this logic now. The surprise remains the surprise, it just reveals itself six months earlier. That’s precious time you could spend working on a name.
For some reason, we became convinced it would be a girl. And great girls’ names seemed bountiful. Jasmine, Isla, Eva, Rosie, Manon. We had reams of them. You could almost make them up on a trip to the garden centre and they still sounded noble and interesting.
Boys’ names are much harder, wiser people than us would declare. So we barely gave them a thought. On cutting the umbilical cord, though, there could be no doubt. We had work to do. For the first time in 25 years, I didn’t have a default boy’s Christian name to turn to, at precisely the moment I needed one.
“What’s he called?” asked every single person that we came across.
Of course, the worst time to make any considered decision is when you have a newborn baby in the house.
Jake? Close enough to Jack, but it felt a bit 90s heart-throb. In hindsight, no bad thing.
Max? An early front-runner; didn’t ring true.
Luca? Was it destined to become the male equivalent of India?
Fred, Cam, Cal, Hal, Sid, Joel. It was hard to find a name we both loved equally. Plus, I was blocking on increasingly spurious grounds.
While we both liked Leo, I couldn’t shake the memory of a particularly annoying character from '80s yachting melodrama Howards’ Way.
There were names that got away, but also some close escapes. During one sleep-deprived week, Harvey was just behind Harrison in the running.
I then veered off-road in a rusty old pick-up, championing names like Noah, Elias and Caleb, as if assembling a Kings of Leon tribute band.
My wife joined me in the Appalachians by declaring she had a thing for Nate. Nice, but in her Northern Irish accent, it sounded a little too much like Russian for no.
Somewhere along the line Isaac came on to an already overcrowded radar. It seemed modern and traditional; local and international; a little obscure but not silly or annoying. I liked the idea of shortening it to Ike, and Clare liked another variant, Zac. It’s a bit random, she thought, but she settled into the idea. By this stage she might have agreed on Horatio.
As recent politics have shown, you should never put important questions to the public. Or worse your own family. But for some reason, I was looking for advice and approval in every quarter.
Whatever you call him he’ll make it his own, people would tell me, as if humouring a psychotic before the police arrived to surround the house.
Imagine the name on a film billboard, was one friend’s slightly odd suggestion. Take the train test, said another, which requires you to imagine calling for your kid out loud in a busy carriage and assess how it sounds. Although it wasn’t clear why a small child had been allowed free rein on a busy intercity service, the principle seemed solid. Though given the person suggesting it had a son called Saul, it clearly wasn’t fool-proof.
Perhaps this whole episode was karmic retribution for a lifetime of being judgemental about other people’s name choices. On the morning that, by law, we had to register our sweet and wholly innocent boy, I was still conjuring new suggestions like a niche form of Tourette’s.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the name Isaac had merely been a little ahead when the time ran out. My own parents only just made the deadline, and still changed their mind with me. If there were any family traditions being handed down, this was it.
Still, the ink was dry on the birth certificate. And the compliments came thick and occasionally gushing. I was at peace with the decision.
Of course, 10 positives were nothing in the face of one raised eyebrow. A few weeks on, I can clearly remember two friends who came out actively against. I’d always thought I’d be grateful to have people in my life who could be frank and candid with me. Turns out I was wrong.
There were other weird moments when people you’d only just met, always older men, would make a crack about whether we spoke Hebrew at home or were on our way to bible study.
As odd as it might sound, I’d never twigged the religious connotations and had assumed the world had moved on from such narrow definitions. Had I already set him up for a life-time of prejudice?
At nursery, meanwhile, everyone was calling him “I-Zak”. I corrected them at first, but soon realised it was an unstoppable force. Kids would shout “I-Zak” from across the street, staff would high-five him with a drawn-out “I-Zaaaak” whenever I dropped him off. How could it be that the majority of adults didn’t know how to pronounce Isaac? No one refers to our greatest-ever scientist as Sir I-Zak Newton, for fuck’s sake. At one point I had to tell him I-Zak was his special nickname.
Then the Christmas cards came addressed to“Issac”. Even from two of his university-educated aunts. Would he forever be correcting people? Keeping it simple was surely child-naming 101.
In Switzerland for work, on my first solo trip since he was born, I found myself at a large dinner being hosted by an important client, a live band playing just for us and a team of waiting staff intent on leaving no wine glass half-empty. Dangerous conditions for a new parent off the leash.
Late in the evening, our table of eight sang along to a cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”. Before I knew what was happening, the singer had beckoned me to join her on stage where I finished the song asa duet in front of a sizeable crowd, mainly Swiss-German men in smart-casual. I returned to my table with a new mission in life — to destroy any video evidence of what had just occurred.
But first I had to field a number of questions. Do you do karaoke much back in London? Yes, weirdly I was doing it a lot before my son was born. What are your favourite songs to do? Probably “Regulate”, “Never Too Much”, “Wicked Game”.
Ah, said one dinner companion, could it be you called your son after Chris Isaak?
I paused to let the idea settle. Having spent the best part of three decades preparing a name, had a year of semi-frequent karaoke really resulted in me subconsciously calling him after the middle-brow 90s rockabilly bluesman, whose only other hit of note was “Blue Hotel”?
Although partly glad I hadn’t gone for Warren or Luther, the possibility, however remote, left me deflated. The doubts returned.
It became hard to watch film credits without pulling out names I might choose if I had the chance to pick again. During the first summer of Covid, I would regularly compile a list of boys’ names to get me off to sleep, as others might count sheep.
Having shown an interest in his middle name, one day Isaac came home to ask, “Daddy, tomorrow can you call me Leo?” To most parents, this would just be a cute little role-play to be humoured for a day. I saw it as a live opportunity to mobilise support for an official renaming process. Support that never came.
It was the moment I realised this obsession had to stop. That it wasn’t the name itself that was the problem but the crazy significance I had attached to it.
He’s just turned six. His friends call him Isey. A sunny boy who likes his name. And so do I. Not long ago, I got talking to a father-to-be about names and he asked me for my thoughts on the process. In a strange way, maybe I was a good person to come to for advice.
Some people overthink it, I said. Don’t be one of them.
Will Hersey is a contributing editor to Esquire. This piece appears in the Summer 2023 issue, out now
