Child names, Superstition, and Superfetation

First, I’d like to introduce an amazing word I came across in my travels through the internets recently: superfetation. Don’t know it? Well, superfetation happens to be “the formation of a fetus from a different menstrual cycle while another embryo is already present in the uterus,” according to the knowledge fellows over at wikipedia.

That a single word covers this phenomenon pleases me greatly.

I happened to notice this word on the very same day that my step-brother sent me an email letting me know that he was having a child. It was quite early in his wife’s pregnancy, so early, in fact, that he didn’t know the sex of the child. He had, however, already come up with gender-dependent names, which he shared with me (Aiden for boy, Kaitlyn for girl).

Call me superstitious, but prior to my son Jerod’s birth, there would have been no chance of my sharing his name with anyone (except his mother, my ex-wife, and then only because it felt fair to let her know what I was going to call her son). Giving up the name so early strikes me as a form of tempting the hand-of-God type activity, which—I know it’s a stretch—reminded me of superfetation.

How? Well, consider the dramatic upswing in multiple births in this country, which in and of itself smacks of religious retribution for late-age pregnancy and the use of fertility drugs instead of vigorous schtupping; then factor in the idea of determining the name of a child before the child even has a sex; add to that the possibility that more children can be created during the pregnancy (superfetation), in a sort-of-miracle (assuming you want many kids all at once) reminiscent of the Immaculate Conception only with fucking—and well, then, it seems to me the better part of valor not to mention the name of the child.

And yes, I mean that sharing the child’s name is the very sort of thing that a God, if he/she/they/whatever existed, potentially might not like and would furthermore consider a high-order provocation resulting in biblical-type smiting.

Keep it to yourself, I say!

Last word (from me) on names: check out namevoyager.com to chart the popularity of your child’s name. Jerod occurs once out of every 50 million births in the United States, and is, in the opinion of this particular website, associated with the color blue.