The name for this son started a few years BEFORE he was a thought to us. When my first son was about a year old, I had a weird, intense dream about angels. Long story short, the dream involved me being visited by 2 angels around a time in my life when things where very very difficult. As many have these clarity moments, the things I remember most about this moment were the names of the angels that visited me. During the dream, I asked the first angel his name and he told me, Michael. As I found this to be VERY profound because of the importance of that name and angel (in Religious dogma) it wasn’t THAT angel that intrigued me the most; it was the second one. I asked the second one, his name and as I remember the dream, he didn’t actually say his name but more so spell it out for me. And as dreams and their cryptic natures can be, I believed its name to be Erickus. Later as I thought about the dream in more detail, I figured that it wasn’t a name, but it might have been a bible verse, like Exodus. However when I told my husband about the dream and what I thought was the name of the angel, he fell in love with the name as I told it to him. We both tried to find ways to use the name, like in stories that we were writing, etc.
About a year later when I found out that I was pregnant, we thankfully didn’t go through the same hardship like with my previous son in not being allowed to find out the sex. During this pregnancy, I had a lot of ultrasounds and therefore I knew early on the sex of the baby and that it was a boy. Again, during the pregnancy, my husband and I didn’t focus too much on names and their importance; however we did want to have a name that was equally as strong as our first child’s name. One name that I was kicking around was Deanglo, as it was the same name as a singer that I was listening to at the time. We didn’t have any other name ideas and didn’t really discuss it up until he was born. I recall my husband coming to me the day after he was born and saying, “Hey, let’s call him Erickzus?” As much as I agreed, I was still thinking about the spelling with the “Eric… beginning.” Many nurses would ask me, “What is your son’s name?” and I would tell them with the next question being, how do you spell that, and I found myself, stuck because I didn’t know how. Finally, I looked at the birth certificate registry form and I saw where my husband wrote, “Aerykxz.” A spelling-bee champ and English major, Aerykxz father was searching for something unique.
Since we named Aerykxz I have actually had people fuss with me that naming him something so difficult with a difficult spelling has ruined his life. The theory is that it is too complex and he will not be able to learn it. Aerykxz learned by age 2 1/2 how to both spell and write his name and was correcting people on its pronunciation.
