What's in a Name?

Let me start this off by saying that my husband and I are not very far into our marriage. We will actually celebrate our second anniversary this November. So, we are still, occasionally, discussing the possibility of buying a house, getting pets, having children, and the like. When it comes to children, I think every couple discusses the possibility of quantity, gender, and naming quite often.

Naming things has always been a sort of quirk of mine. I don’t think I was every really good at it as a child, and now that I’m an adult with the chance of gifting a living, breathing human being with one, I’m pretty much terrified.

I mean… Come on, I named my cat Shoubi (again, pronounced Show-Bee), and I was, most definitely, lucid at the time! I spent a lot of time choosing that name. Imagine what I could possibly come up with for a child.

The choices are unfathomable.

Needless to say, D and I have discussed names for our progeny at length.

Now, I’ve told you all of this to draw you further back in time nearly fifteen years ago (when I was still in single digits on the age board). I can honestly tell you now that I really like my name. I love it. I love to write it. I love the way it sounds, and I love the way its spelled. However, fifteen years ago I wasn’t really fond of it.
In particular, I did not like my middle name. You see, I had always wanted to have a beautifully flowing name - especially when written, and in my nine-year-old mind to be “flowing” it needed to have a ‘y’… or a ‘g’… or anything that dipped beneath the line on my wide ruled notebook paper. I assured myself that it had to be more fun to write your name with one of those extra little loop-de-loops in it.

Even in my teenage years when I decided that I couldn’t be the crazy cat lady, I was still a little caught up on having one of those pretty letters in my name. I decided I could have one… if I married the “right” guy. It amazes me now that I did look - for several years - with a certain scrutinizing quality at every man’s last name.

Fortunately, I found my husband (or rather, he found me), and he didn’t really give me a choice on whether or not I wanted to marry him. He really just decided that I was going to marry him, and that was that.
It took me a long time to appreciate my name for its own swirling loops and hoops. I just had to learn to look at it from a different angle. It turns out that capital ‘S’ and ‘L’ can be quite beautiful when written the right way.

And my little girl, if I ever have one, will get a pretty ‘q’ in her name.