Nina Malvina

One day last spring, soon after finding out we were having a baby girl, I was sitting at our kitchen counter watching Jon cook. After a short pause in our conversation, he said “You know, you said a name the other day. And every time I think about it, it makes me smile.” We had been listening to a classic Armenian dance song called “Ha Nina,” and after weeks of throwing around ideas for baby names, I had casually joked “Hey, what about Nina?”

He was right. It made me smile, too. It wasn’t a name I had been planning on all my life. It just came to us organically and happened to feel completely right. The name seemed to choose us, not the other way around. We didn’t talk about it again until we went to the Water Lantern Festival the night of June 1st. We each designed our paper lanterns in secret, and when we revealed them to each other, we saw that we had both devoted our words and drawings to our daughter, our Nina. Both of us committed her name to paper without needing to discuss it anymore than those few words exchanged over the kitchen counter. Launching those lanterns onto the lake, we gave her an unofficial naming ceremony.

We drove our family crazy by deciding to keep the name to ourselves until she was born. In a time when every last thing is known and shared with the world, we wanted this one thing to be our own secret, something to surprise them with when they met her. And despite my dad’s best efforts to guess a different girl’s name every time we spoke for the next 6 months, I’m proud to say we never cracked.

Nina Malvina Sharoyan Anzalone was first introduced to the world on November 11th, 2019 and we have treasured every moment with her until today, January 14th, her very first name day. Depending on who you ask, the name Nina could mean “favor,” “grace,” or “strong,” and any one of those feels right. Although we didn’t purposely name her after her, she does happen to share the name with Nina Ananiashvili, my favorite ballerina who I saw as Odette in Swan Lake and Nikiya in La Bayadere when I was a little girl. Graceful and strong.

The only two hints we had given people who asked were that she wouldn’t be named after anyone in our lives and that we had decided on a name that wasn’t Armenian. Both were true—of her first name. We didn’t tell them that her two middle names would tick both of those boxes instead. I always knew if I had a daughter, I would want my lifelong best friend to be her namesake. Giving her my maiden name as an additional middle name was a beautiful thought from Jon, to ensure that she would always carry that piece of her Armenian identity.

One of the things Jon and I would repeat to each other incredulously all throughout the pregnancy was, “She’s going to be here soon. In this house. She’s going to live with us." Sure enough, before we knew it, she was here. In this house! Living with us! We’ve been consumed by that reality for the past two months, and it has been beautiful.

We can’t wait to say her name over and over for the rest of our lives, and to smile.