Of Scottish Islands and Family Names

TW: miscarriage

“What do you think about the name G-?” My husband smiled at me as we drove past Chic-fil-A. 

I looked out the window. Bi-Lo sped past and we slowed down to a light. 
“I think I like it.” I whispered it a couple of times as the light turned green and buildings began speeding by again. “Yeah, I really like it.” 

But it wasn’t to be. I lost that little baby at 7 and a half weeks, two days before we moved to Scotland. For months I put the name we whispered away in the dark corners of my brain. I wondered if we’d ever have our baby G. It ate me up, but I also knew, deep in my heart, that little baby we lost wasn’t ever baby G. I never named it. Just the heart-wrenching, “Baby we lost”. Like a sock or a remote. A baby we lost and never found. 

Months later, we drove up the wintery Scottish west coast in early December. We had the unusual situation of having a rental car and spontaneously stopped overnight in Fort William. 

“Where should we go now?” Aaron was appealing to my sense of adventure and the fact that I was fully and completely in love with Scotland. 

“Skye.” 

We didn’t know, but driving north meant hours on windy roads. No speedy highways here. We drove slowly, taking hours to get to Skye. Of course, our speed, or lack thereof, was compounded by frequent stops because the landscape was incredible. 

There’s a bridge to Skye, an epic build that took 3 years and was completed in 1995. Winter is the best time to visit Skye. The tourists are all in warmer, sunnier locations, because the unpredictable Scottish weather doesn’t always cooperate. And while moody pictures of Scotland are amazing, the likelihood you’ll get the perfectly moody picture in the winter is actually reliant on chance, and less on photographic skills. 

I walked along the beach as Aaron got a coffee from the little shop on the water. To my utter amazement, I found little yellow periwinkle shells. Growing up, I collected the same shells along my grandmother’s beach in Maine. They felt like a symbol of home. Maine and Scotland. I blinked back hot tears and put them in my pocket. A bit of home in a foreign country. 

When we found out I was pregnant again, I knew her name. We found out at 20 weeks she would be a little girl, but before that, I whispered her name. 

Georgiana Skye. Named after two great grandfathers and the first Scottish island we visited. The island that we spent only a couple of hours on but that reminded me we were home. 

When we were deciding on names for our next pregnancy, we struggled. We loved the family name connection, and also the Scottish island name. This was a baby born in Scotland after all. And while we knew we wouldn’t always be here, we wanted him to carry a bit of Scotland with him like his sister. 

I got onto Google one night. “Scottish Islands.” 

Wikipedia popped up. I started skimming them. They were the usual names. “Harris, Lewis, hey, how about Bute, baby?” I laughed. “Mull. Or not?”

“Aaron. What about this one?” I tapped the screen lightly. 

He frowned. “How do you pronounce it?” 

Thankfully, we had Google. 
From that night on we whispered the name and argued lightly back and forth. “I like keeping it as a middle name. It’s consistent!” I argued. 

“But if you’re going to call him by it, use it as a first name!” Aaron argued back. 

In fact, we were still discussing it after our little boy was born, en caul, in a shockingly speedy birth that awed me and the midwives. 
“So, is it his first or middle name?” Aaron asked as we walked up the registry office. Babies in Scotland are named at the registry office, and we had 2 weeks to decide on the order of his name.

“Middle.” I determined. 

“Are you sure?” he laughed as we sat in the office. The registry lady sat across from us, looking at us over her glasses frames. 

“Definitely.” 

William Torran, named after my grandfather and a rocky outcropping off the western coast of Scotland.

We finalised the baby’s name 3 weeks before she was born. I had a night of sudden cramping and hopeful contractions. As we were watching Braveheart, Aaron turned to me. “What about Murron?” 

I wrinkled my nose. “Nah.” I bounced up and down on the exercise ball a few more times. “Wait, with what?” 

“The one you like.” He stepped closer to the tv. 

I whipped out my phone and googled it. “It means seal, but it’s not an island. I really hate to break our streak. It’s nice having Scottish islands, you know?” 

He nodded and kept watching it. I kept googling. 

“What about.” He hesitated. “Inchmurrin.” 

I made a face. Nope. No way. No way I could saddle our poor child with something like that. 

“What if we shortened it?” 

I said it outloud. Again and again. “I really like it!” 

He chuckled. “I suggested it a while ago and you didn’t like it.” 

“Yeah, I don’t remember that at all.” Thank goodness for pregnancy brain.

Well past her due date, our little pudding, our Elisabeth Murrin was born. She has my middle name and her island middle name like her sister and brother. Her name comes from an island in the nearby Loch Lomond. My littlest blessing whose name means “God is bountiful” came to us during a pandemic. Easily my hardest pregnancy and most isolating. The most appropriate name I could think of, for our little reminder about the providence and bounty of God. 

Each one of our children bears a family name and a Scottish island name. Names are powerful and we wanted our children to carry both their family’s heritage and also some of the history of the beautiful, wild land where they were born. This was the best way we could think of to remind our children where they came from and where they were born.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "A Name".