Juniper was named after a tree and a podcast.
You didn’t think I’d have three kids without at least one of them getting an arboreal name, right? And junipers are pretty great, especially high desert junipers. I love their propensity to fight to grow upwards; even if erosion greatly shifts their base, they’ll manage to course correct and find their way upright.
But let me tell you about the podcast. In my opinion, an episode of Radiolab called “23 Weeks, 6 Days” is the best example of storytelling ever done via podcast.
It tells the story of a girl named Juniper who was born very, very, very premature. As the name suggests she was born right at the cutoff of what’s considered viable. And she and her parents had to fight- through holes in organs, six months in the NICU, extended times with limited responsiveness, and a major surgery performed on a one-pound baby.
I love all the ways that episode shows her parents going to bat for her. And a rerelease of the episode ended with the reporters spending time with her at age 4. It was a simple scene of her playing at home, but her dad explained simply “after you’ve been through what we went through, everything happened in those couple of hours.”
“The entire world was contained inside that morning. And all of the blank chapters of her life were inside that morning waiting to be written.”
That changed the way I look at every single moment. They all contain possibility as long as we’re here breathing.
•••
Juniper’s middle name is Phileena. At first glance it looks like a portmanteau of Philippe and Deanna, but that was a total coincidence and not what we were going for. Though, Filipinos do love a good (and sometimes not always good) mommy-daddy name mashup.
Phileena is an Anglicized, feminine version of my dad’s name, Felino. He passed away when I was five. Now he’s a grandpa to three.
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