What's in a name? A cocktail of birthing drugs, mostly

Outrage over the issue, on the one hand, seems a little precious, especially considering how our flinty antecedents would step from the cave to casually shake out a beetle-browed infant before popping back inside to cook up a nice fresh placenta for the clan and maybe fight off a bear or a jealous cousin before bed.

Conversely, considering what a woman goes through before, during and after childbirth, it not only seems cruel she should be shunted out of the ward before she's good and ready, it borders on the criminal, particularly if she has more indigent urchins back home just waiting to swarm over her as soon as she walks through the door.

My own mother had our brothers about a decade after my sister and I were born, and if memory serves, that first time back, they had to call in the SES to use the jaws of life to pry her from her maternity wing bed.

So much importance happens in the postnatal fog.

If you're lucky, it can be a becalmed time, one of bonding and reaffirmation. Equally, it can be confronting and terrifying and daunting, and tease out the simmering reality that help is required, now.

For myself and my wife, it was a time of learning - then, as more children came, of remembering and relearning.

One of our children (the middle one, unsurprisingly) has grown to be a lush for the tactile and the sensual. She's not happy unless she has something plush against her skin or is elbows-deep in some awful goo or slime she's concocted from a few readily available household items as if she were MacGyver.

Tickling the same synapses, she's also a fan of those "oddly satisfying" videos, an apparent online sensation where prosaic undertakings such as shuffling cards or machining car components are set to new-age muzak in order to feed a deep yearning for... something or other.

I sort of get it.

To this day, I don't think I've been involved in anything as satisfying as swaddling a newborn, and if people are making money out of spinning tops to Enya, they could do worse than to stick a few burritoed babies in front of the iPhone and film them rolling around the cot as if maggots from a carcass or bullets from a gun (they probably already have).

The exquisite art of swaddling was taught to us as we luxuriated for a couple of days in my wife's hospital room, peering over at our angelic firstborn and congratulating ourselves on what a sterling sleeper she was (they're like terrorist cells, when they eventually strike, life is never the same).

We were visited upon by so many munificent experts in that period, we'll be forever grateful for the tips and the advice and the counselling.

It's during that druggy haze of acute suggestibility, however, that I do wonder whether they shouldn't send in a few "naming consultants" along with the lactation advocates, gynaecologists and nutritionists.

This reoccurs to me most Januarys when the crack-like most-popular-baby-names-of-the-year lists are published.

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As I scrolled through the 2019 versions, to again be underwhelmed by the white-bread Charlottes and Olivers, the sturdy Jacks and Janes, and the royally sanctioned Williams and Elizabeths, I did feel just a pang of envy and maybe a little guilt.

While certainly not of the deed-poll inducing Zowie Bowie or Moon Unit Zappa variety, we didn't give our kids "top 10" names - and when we came close, we still mucked about with their middle names, just to be absolutely sure there could never be any escape from their Gen-X parents' overinflated sense of individuality.

The boy's name, particularly, came to us in that postpartum bubble when we were the coolest cats in town, albeit lolling around in an alternative dimension where the future didn't exist.

Other than me flirting with naming him after Augustus McCrae from Lonesome Dove, we went in with no firm plan, so came out with something you might name a clown or a used car salesman.

On the upside, he's the only one at school, it fits like a glove, and lots of people dig the name that my wife - who is strong and not plagued with the same pariah dog of regret as her wearisome husband - always did. He's a happy lad and we couldn't imagine him as anything or anyone else.

He's our used car salesman and we love him.

But just to return to that cave, I suspect (as with diet and the environment) that had we just stayed primitive, the world would be a better place - and, in that world, we'd simply name our children for that which inspires us on a daily basis and nourishes us as a species.

Hard to come up with a top 10 these days.