Our daughter’s name has more significance than we realized and we could not be happier

I felt like this might be a story this sub would enjoy. Our daughter Diana Lucia was born earlier this month and it took us about a day to settle on her name. We did not know the sex of our baby until birth, so we had a short list of boys and girls names to hopefully choose from at birth.

All our options for girl names included Lucia as either a first or middle name because I wanted to honor my grandmother. Our last name is a very traditional Dutch name, and we wanted names that sounded good with it but also reflected my Latina heritage and could be pronounced by English and Spanish speakers.

Labor was really hard on both the baby and me, and she had to get whisked away to the NICU immediately. Things were not looking good but after a couple of hours she started making a rapid recovery. We narrowed our name options down to Lucia Ruth (she looked like a Ruthie) and Diana Lucia and eventually chose Diana because we felt it reflected the strength she’d demonstrated at birth and in her recovery.

After naming her, my husband and I left the NICU to rest in the recovery room and he started doing a deep dive about the goddess Diana when he suddenly got so giddy. He started to read aloud details about one of Diana’s epithets: Diana Lucina. This aspect of Diana fulfills the role of the goddess of childbirth and the protector of women during difficult labor.

I was such a mess of hormones and stress from the past 24 hours that I could not stop crying when he told me. We’d originally put the name on our shortlist months earlier because 1) it’s beautiful and 2) it felt poetic in that it essentially means “moonlight”. Even with our cursory knowledge about mythology, we had no idea that our combination of first and middle names had that special significance around childbirth. It is such a beautiful coincidence and we have no doubts that we’d picked the perfect name for our daughter.