During my pregnancy, I was convinced I was having a boy—the idea of a daughter never even crossed my mind. When the ultrasound results were inconclusive and someone mentioned it looked “sort of like a boy,” I felt relieved. But during the second scan, we found out it was actually a girl. I was devastated. I cried, threw tantrums, and drove my poor husband up the wall. I didn’t speak to anyone for an entire week.
Eventually, I began to accept it—after all, she was our child. My husband and I started thinking about names. Liza, his daughter from a previous marriage, came to mind. It was beautiful, fitting, and matched her father’s surname so well that no other name seemed quite right. My husband, however, pushed for Miroslava. I didn’t like how it sounded and just couldn’t warm up to it. We argued about it until the very moment I went into labor.
Finally, we agreed to wait until she was born and see what felt right. We figured the right name would come to us once we saw her. She arrived safely, but five days later, we still hadn’t named her. We ignored the flood of well-meaning suggestions from friends and family and spent days staring at our little girl, trying names one by one, even going through endless lists—nothing felt right.
Then one day I said, “What about Marusya? It’s a beautiful, old Russian name.” My husband, probably exhausted from the name war, agreed. The next morning, he went to the registry office. When he came back with the birth certificate, there it was: Marusya. Not Maria. Not Mar’ya. Just Marusya.
But that wasn’t what he had meant—he must have been misheard or made a mistake. Either way, it was now official.
I went to the registry office to try to correct it, but they told me it was too late. The documents had been issued, and changes weren’t that simple. I’d need to go through an official application process and even get guardian approval—this wasn’t like fixing a typo on a prescription.
Now more than a year has passed, and we’re still in this surreal limbo. I’ve thought about changing her name, but I don’t even like Maria anymore. At home, we call her Masya, Musya, or Murka. Still, she is our child. But every time I think about dealing with the paperwork, I start crying again.
Maybe it’s finally time to make a decision. What would you do?