When I was pregnant the first time, Afa and I decided that we wanted our daughter to have a Tongan Bible name. Being the data-driven, methodical person that I was, I went through the Tongan Bible and found the names of all the women I would want to name my daughter after and other words that would make good names like grace, peace, hope and joy. I put them all in a list. Afa and I drove from Tennessee to Denver early in my pregnancy and during the drive we went through the list and gave each of the names a score from 1 to 10 to figure out which names we liked the best.

My favorite Bible character is Rahab, and the Tongan version of that name is Lehapi. I loved it and wanted that to be our daughter’s name even before we did our exercise. We narrowed it down to three names with Lehapi at the top of the list. At this point, I started calling her that name and telling a few people, including my mom, that we were considering it. When we went for our 20 week ultrasound, there was a really cute picture of her foot, so my mom started calling her Happy Feet. We had not found a middle name we liked yet, but in my mind, this was the baby’s name.

When I was 36 weeks pregnant, Afa and I went on our first marriage retreat. At this point I had been calling the baby Lehapi for about four months. Because we lived in Colorado at the time, the retreat was in the mountains. So we drove about 2 hours to a beautiful hotel and checked in, listening closely to the weather report because there was supposed to be snow. During our birthing classes, they explained that the drop in barometric pressure during snow storms causes some women to go into labor. If this happened, it was possible that you would have to be transferred to a different hospital because other women were also going into labor during the same drop in pressure and the hospitals could receive more women than they had rooms.

I woke up about 3am the first night we were there with intense lower back pain, which I attributed to the hotel bed. I tried to go back to sleep, but it was intermittently very painful. I got up and took a shower and the very fancy bathroom and generally felt better. During the first session of our retreat, I had to keep standing up and walking in the back because my lower back hurt badly, and I again thought I must have slept wrong (relatively common at 36 weeks pregnant). My friend, who had five children at the time, saw me get up at intervals approximately ten minutes apart and keep rubbing my back. She walked over and said “I think you’re having contractions.” I told her that contractions don’t feel like this, and she responded “How would you know?” I laughed loudly because she had a very valid point. This was my first introduction to back labor, which is about as pleasant as it sounds.

After some convincing, I called Kaiser and talked to the advice nurse. She told me that normally, they wouldn’t have a first time mom come in while contractions were still ten minutes apart but the snow storm was getting worse. They thought it was better for me to come in for monitoring than to stay in the hotel and go into active labor with no way to get to the hospital in a few feet of snow. As we started the trip to the closest hospital since we were two hours from our hospital in Denver, I thought we were going on quite the adventure. But the contractions got closer together during the drive, and we started sliding on the ice across multiple lanes of the road. It went from adventurous to frightening relatively fast. I could sense Afa getting angry, but I couldn’t handle his emotions, the scary road trip, and the contractions all at once so I pushed that observation to the side. We arrived at the hospital, and they hooked me up to the contraction monitors and asked lots of intake questions since we had never been to this hospital before.

Afa sat in the corner of the monitoring room with his black hoodie on and the hood up, just stewing. After the nurse left, he snapped “I don’t like her.” I was taken aback at his tone and when I asked why, he said that he was angry she didn’t talk to him. Because we were safely at the hospital, I could finally relax and ask more questions about what was going on. He was angry that labor had started too early, that we were in the wrong hospital, and that our families were not with us. These were all valid concerns, and as the monitoring continued, we both calmed down. Eventually, the contractions stopped (thankfully!), and we returned to the hotel for the rest of the retreat.

On the drive home on Sunday, Afa told me “I don’t like the name you picked.” The sentence caught me off guard completely. I had been calling the baby that name for months. We were four weeks from our due date and had already worked through my process of carefully selecting a name. In my mind, there wasn’t time to start over. This had to be a methodical decision with a logical ending. I was crushed. Afa didn’t like it because he didn’t want our daughter to be named after a prostitute and the name itself sounded like the Tongan word for “crippled.” We went over to some friends’ house for dinner the next day, and when they asked how we were doing, I broke down in tears because Afa wanted to pick a different name. They helped me work through the waves of emotions and come to the decision that we needed a new baby name.

We returned to the list. I was picking two random names off the list and saying them together, and I said “Ana Lia” – the Tongan versions of “Hannah” and “Leah” together. Afa immediately fell in love with it. In Tongan culture, it is traditional to name children after someone in the family. Afa’s aunt Ana had sponsored them to come to the United States, and he had lived with her as a child while they got settled here. It was a perfect tribute to her. For the baby’s middle name, he chose the name Tangesi after his paternal grandmother. Now, you may be wondering how to pronounce that name….because I certainly was. It is challenging to transliterate, but it is similar to “thong – YES – ee” with a very specific pronunciation of the th and the ng. Needless to say, I couldn’t pronounce it correctly despite Afa trying to teach me over the course of several days. I didn’t like that Afa changed the name I loved, and I was even more upset that my daughter had a name I couldn’t even pronounce.

When I went into labor for real four weeks later, the nurse asked if we had a name yet and I looked at her and deadpan replied, “Not one that I like.” Maintaining her jolly demeanor, she simply wrote “Baby Girl Maile” on the board. I got up and changed it to “Ana Lia Maile” a few hours later. (You can read the whole story of her birth here.) I knew that was her name despite my strong objections.

For the next six weeks, I called her “Baby.” I refused to use her name. Even in text messages I would say “Baby and I went for a walk” or “Baby just went down for a nap.” It took so much surrender (and practicing the pronunciation) to come around to loving her name, which I do now. I understand the importance of keeping names in the family, and I think her name is musically beautiful now, which people have told me about my name my whole life. Yes, it’s difficult to say and to spell, but I survived that…so she will be fine. And she has a wonderfully unique name that her Daddy selected especially for her.