My Daughter’s Name

My daughter’s name is Zephrine Josephine Yazvin. Her Hebrew name is Ne’ima Shoshana. This is how we picked her name.

We really struggled picking Zephrine’s name. If Elon Musk can name his child using letters that don’t exist, then no names are off-limits, and that creates decision paralysis if you’re perfectionistic like Jane and avoidant like me.

We had a starting point. Jane promised her great uncle Osik (Joseph in English) an hour before he died 18 years ago that she’d name her child after him. I was perfectly happy with this promise. Though I’d never met Osik, everything I’ve heard about him and seen from videos told me that he was a kind, intelligent, gentle man. Also, the name Joseph means “to supplement”, which I like. I wanted my daughter to always remember that she adds to our life (and the world), and is never a burden, no matter what happens to her. However, because we will only ever have girls thanks to the fact that we have 7 more female frozen embryos, we knew we’d never have a boy to name Joseph. Still, pretty easy, we just name our daughter Josephine, right?

Except the name didn’t feel right for our daughter’s first name. We looked up variations of Josephine. I was a fan of “Josette, “ (Josephine in French) but Jane thought the name was too pretentious since we’re not French.

We looked for ways to name her after our late grandparents, but didn’t want to go too literal. They lived very hard lives, and we didn’t want her to carry that inter-generational trauma. We considered various…