What’s in a Name? (Part I)

I don’t think Shakespeare had it right.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

I never liked my name. I fooled around with it, adding an ‘e’ where none existed before, dropped my first name, married too many times, though I did like the third husband’s last name so much I kept it until I married my own true love. He’s my forever guy. His name is a mouthful but it’s now mine as well as his, so I like it well enough.

However, I never thought my name reflected who I was. Many times I asked my mother why she chose the names by which I was called. She’d shrug and say it was that or ‘Denice’ which her brother spoiled. “Da Niece?” he’d guffawed, “So when you have a boy it will be Da Nephew?”

She also told me that she had names all picked out for a boy — Michael Lee …

It took me a minute when she said that. My younger brother, the older twin was Michael Lee, the younger twin was named after our father’s best friend. Where did ‘Michael Lee’ come from? She liked the name. That was it, she just liked it. I thought, ‘Well, then why wasn’t that my name? Didn’t you like me?’

There are women named Michael: Michael Learned, Michael Michelle, Michael Steele, Michael Burnham. Lee is gender free. Why not name her girl a favourite name? “Oh I couldn’t do that, I was saving it for the boy I was supposed to have,” she informed me. “I never really planned on having a girl first”, she said. “You just didn’t do that. Boy first, then a girl. I thought that was how everybody did it.”

She did have an older brother but several of the other families to which we were tied by blood or otherwise seemed to ignore that rule. It didn’t matter. This was what she thought; that of course she’d have a boy first simply because boys had to be first. She didn’t even have a name for a girl other than the joke above. ‘She never thought to dream of a girl in pink and lace, she dreamed of a boy with dirty knees and smudged face’.

Michael Lee… I would have liked being called that. It was just unusual enough for a woman to be called Michael. And Lee? I could have changed the spelling to Leigh.

But there were several other choices. My mother could have named me Johanna, Rosanna or Marguerite for any of the recently deceased Great Grandmothers . She could have named me the maligned Denice or Linda- Mary- Patricia-Barbara, popular names in my year. Or she could have honoured her mother and my father’s mother and named me Olivia Leone. Now, that would have been a name. I think I’d have liked that name, strong but beautiful, unusual but not weird. But she didn’t have a name to give me and didn’t really have a preference so she gave the privilege of naming me to my grandmother.

Grandmother was sceptical at first. She felt justified in her negative feelings about my mother’s behaviour which resulted in me. My father was barely eighteen years old when I was born and my mother saw her nineteenth birthday just before my birth. Grandmother was thankfully, soon delighted with me but at the time of my birth she was less so. “Why don’t you just name her Carol. You aren’t using the name,” she said to my mother offhandedly.

Grandmother was practical. Here was a ‘perfectly good name’ as she put it, ‘going to waste’. My mother was called by her middle name which was Darlene, or by her nickname ‘Honey’ which denoted her ‘sweetness’. She recalled saying, when the suggestion was made to use her neglected name, “Oh, I don’t care. Why not?”

Then my Grandmother had a brainstorm and said “We could add ‘Dawn’ which sounds like ‘Don’ so that she is named after both of you!”

Donley was my father’s name. Of course, he’d shortened it to Don. More manly. The poor boy didn’t know what hit him and as a consequence he had no opinion other than “I hope her voice is low.”

I was given the name, a hand-me-down name (she never used it, it was practically brand new!) and an approximation of the sound of my father’s name for the middle space. Good enough. Done deal.

As I was growing up my mother didn’t make any bones about the origin of my name, the reasons for it, the clear disregard for any importance that a ‘special’ name for an unlooked for girl might have had. It never occurred to her that this exercise that she and my grandmother engaged in would have any meaning at all for me (a person who sees meaning in every human action and reaction) which was a strong indicator of a certain level of dis-awareness. She told me this story, along with many others, with much more an ear to the significance of her soprano voice than of the effect her words might have. I learned to hear it all with a flat face.

Many years later one of my brothers (the one with the ‘first child’ name) asked me why I added an ‘e’ to Carol. I started to explain but he walked off before I managed more than a handful of words. Belatedly and obviously, I understood that he wasn’t the least bit interested in my thoughts. No one in my family ever was. We know where they took their cues. I shrugged but internally I was shaken and saddened and angry for the sad feelings, not at my brother really, but at myself for ever thinking that the years would foster any difference.

Names. Did you know there is a whole cadre of people out there who are professional namers? I don’t know where they live or how much they are paid but mostly they name cars. Or companies. Or brands or something else metallic. Their job is to make whatever they are naming attractive or evocative of emotions that make you want more of whatever it is that is named. ‘Acura’, ‘Tiguan’, ‘Silver Cloud’. So, my name, the hand-me-down name… what emotions are we to suppose it evoked? Especially after my far too young parents divorced?

A small thing, you might say? Well, all my life my name and its story has loomed large enough to shift my life in ways I’d rather it didn’t. That’s the takeaway here. If I’d been named differently, more thoughtfully, how different a person would I be?

End of Part I — Part II to follow