You've barely pushed her out when people start asking you what you're going to call the new baby. You can't laugh or cough without crossing your legs first, your stomach looks like spent balloons left over from a 21st birthday party but here you go, the biggest decision of your life awaits and you must meet the challenge.
If you were managing director of a multinational food or additive company, you'd be employing name experts at exorbitant prices to help you decide what to call your latest production. "A rose by any other name . . ." the nurses tell you, but it ain't true, as every parent knows.
Names predict lifestyles. They're a noose around your neck or a magic-carpet ride to Hollywood stardom or the presidency. Names are brands that carry you - and your baby - through a multitude of virtual and actual futures. Names are history and poetry and accent and allegiances rolled into one. Once, there were Catholic names and Protestant names; Deirdre versus Daphne, so to speak, and you could tell more in five minutes from a person's name than from almost anything else about them.
But the barriers are breaking down. Judging by the Central Statistics Office's new list of the top 100 Irish babies names, the only place left where you'll be able to tell Protestant from Catholic, or Jew from Hindu, will be Northern Ireland. Everywhere else, the borders are slip-slipping away. A name we couldn't even pronounce 20 years ago is now number one on the girlie charts.
Chloe is the new Bridget. Just as Marian dated the birth year of babies from in or around 1951 (the Marian Year), and as John Paul dates a generation born after the Pope's visit - which tells us something about how Irish people celebrated it - Chloe will forever condemn its bearers to a certain time and place when Ireland dropped both fada and umlaut to instead embrace a home counties ethos of soap opera where "nice" girls all sound like they come from Surrey, have their own ponies and get brought to every concert by Boyzone and the Spice Girls.
School classes will be filled with girls called Chloe, just as classes in my time witnessed the battle between the Ciaras and the Marys. The name will then feel common, filter down the socio-economic scale, and eventually be dropped, to wallow in the kind of aura a moniker like Gobnait has now. (Names are indicators of social class, which is why as yet we have no Darrens or Elvises riding our posh new Tiger.)
Yes, I realise that I am not one to talk. This usually misspelt, mispronounced name has at times attracted accusations which label its bearer a retrograde nationalist with highly undesirable leanings. Indeed.
Its sole advantage, before I had a picture byline, was that a phalanx of readers thought I was a man. I liked getting letters with the title "Mr". It encouraged me to imagine the kind of man I might have been, had destiny not intended me for these perfumed climes.
Gender-bending is something women used to be able to access in certain professions, particularly religious vocations. You could take a man's name, and thus acquire some of the aura that went with it: Sister Patrick, for example, or Sister Thomas, Sister Joseph, Sister James. Our head nun took the name of Borgia, which guaranteed her access to the top. Brrr.
But the gender-bending did not work in reverse, save for female impersonators. You never heard of Christian Brothers called Brother Louise, Brother Mary, or Brother Theresa. Or Pope Grace. Why not? Fewer female saints, obviously, but surely also a fear of squandering gravitas for the lighter connotations of a female name.
Which is the rub. Just like Johnny Cash's song about that boy called Sue, male names, other than nicknames, are assigned considerably more authority than women's. In the Bond movie reprises now on TV, for example, the women all sound like cocktails - Kir Royale, Pussy Galore - which is perhaps a case of form following function.
And the reverse. How is a girl to get on?
If you are called Mary, Maire or Elizabeth, you are more likely to win a seat at the cabinet table, although you will still be in an overall minority. Named Zsa-Zsa, you haven't got a chance. This style hegemony grips men in politics too, but with greater variations: there's a complete absence of Deans, Darrens and Jasons in government, but more than a few Charlies.
In fact we can test this nascent hypothesis about names and gravitas simply by transposing from the CSO's thorough list the names of boys for those of girls which carry equal ranking.
Our current leaders translate as Amber Ahern, Orla McCreevy and Paul Harney, with opposition provided by Katie Bruton and Kelly Quinn. Megan Trimble and Megan Ervine don't look near as pretty as does Nicola Paisley, although Holly McMichael is reportedly planning a make-over with Irish Times fashion expert Leah O'Byrne. Katie Hume and Kim Mallon would doubtless insist on keeping in touch with Natasha Adams and Jane McGuinness, even without the help of former councillor Lauren Morrison who is off to launch her novel. But with journalists like Saoirse O'Dowd writing from New York, and home-based media women such as Michaela Harris and Sorcha Dunphy, their whisperings will be closely watched.
Alternately, we might consider a festival of theatre by Jade Friel led by the Abbey's new artistic director Kayleigh Barnes, followed by a Sophie Murphy and Ruth Beckett series with music commissioned from Michelle Keating and Aimee Lunny. We couldn't change the Vincent Browne or Deirdre Purcell radio shows, as their names don't make the top 100. Nor need we alter writer James Joyce, who at any rate picked a wonderful alter-ego by combining first-martyr and architect-creator together as Stephen Dedalus.
But new drama from fiction writers Karl Binchy and Eva Toibin would be a coup, while a full-length play from Nobel Prize-winning poet Heather Heaney makes for a theatrical sensation.
Names mirror parents' aspirations so perfectly that it's surprising no anthropologist has investigated the cultural meanings they enclose. Fewer Irish names in the top 100 list - 28 for boys and 18 for girls - may suggest we're escaping our bog-ridden past, but swapping the iconography of vernacular myth and legend for that of Baywatch, Friends and a plethora of romantic novels is hardly a measure of progress. What's wrong with a bit of bog now and again?
The awful straitjacket of having such a homogenous ancestry isn't going to be relieved by turning Bebhinn into Zara or Bhuilbhe into Leanne - just as the obvious fracture between girls' names and women's powerfulness isn't solved by encouraging our Taoiseach to call himself Amber once a week.