And Zen What

Have you heard that wonderful 60s (I think) song, "The Name Game"? It's on one of our very favorite ever CDs, a Kids' Rock n' Roll compilation. Great beat, catchy yet near-incomprehensible (for ol' geezer moi anyway) lyrics, and a formula that can be repeated endlessly, and I do mean endlessly, by the inhabitants of the back row seat on long car trips.

And did you know that if you google "baby names" you get 46,200,000 results in 0.11 seconds?

Names are important. Parents agonize over, worry about, endlessly play and replay the possible combinations ("No, NO!! That will give her the initials D-U-M!!! Not good!!!!"), try to avoid offending family members expecting that this time Great Aunt Mehitabelle will finally have a namesake, scour name dictionaries seeking out a name with meaning but not too much meaning, try to think like the future 7 year olds whose lives will be dedicated to playground teasing ("No, no!!!! They'll call him Stinky Linky!!!").

Parents adopting internationally get another circle of Name Hell to contend with. Keep the child's "birth name" (but what if the orphanage gave it to her and not the birthparents?)? Incorporate it ("John Paul Chao Fu Fan Nickerson-Sanderval is NOT too long--it'll fit, see? You just have to write really small!!!")? Forget all that and name him/her yourself because after all it's important--you read it on the internet!--for both your and the child's psychological health to claim him or her. Plus you've waited all this time and been through so much and all you want is to name your child.......

It's tricky stuff.

And it got trickier at my house the other day. Mom, MOM! was trying to explain the term "nickname" to Six, who, frankly, was getting slightly alarmed by the slippery-slidiness of it all. Finally, I remembered that Three had confided to me some months after coming home that her birth mother had called her by a different name from the one on all the documentation. (For blog purposes, let's say her birth mother called her "Twa"--the actual names are totally unrelated, by the way, so this substitution is misleading, but it's the best I can do right now.)

So I used that as an example. "Ok, Six, in Haiti, sometimes Three was called 'Twa' and that was her nickname."

"No," said Three.

"What?"

"No," repeated Three, in her extravagantly fetching deep Haitian accent, "No, dot was not my neekname. Dot was my name before I went to the ofalina."

Clutching the counter for support, I probed a bit. Turns out that Three's birthmother decided to place her in the orphanage using her (Three's) middle name, deciding at the same time to use her own (i.e., the birthmother's) middle name on all the paperwork. The two middle names are virtually identical. The two occulted first names are not.

I had misunderstood what Three told me long ago, but I made very sure not to misunderstand it this time. It turns out, also, that One and Two have been knowing this for a long time. "Oh yeah," they nodded, "Her REAL name is Twa."

Three/Twa went on to tell me that Six's real first name was, in Haiti, an entirely different first name from what he was called in the orphanage. Six doesn't remember either name, however, which is fortunate because neither are names that could be pronounced by anybody but a loving mother here in the good ol' U. S. of A.

As our conversation continued, it became very clear that Three (we will now return to our regularly scheduled pseudonym) hadn't wanted me to know her "real name" until now. And that she now wants to return to that real name.

Done.

It's a name that will be mangled more often than pronounced correctly (though not as badly as either of Six's original Haitian names would be), but then her new middle name (which is, ahem, her OLD middle name...I know it's confusing, but think how totally at sea the school will be and join me in an evil chuckle about it all) was also destroyed more often than not in conversation and roll call situations.

I never had a chance to name her myself; she was 9 when she came home. But this feels like something equivalent. She trusts me now to know her real name, her first name. She is allowing me to call her by the name her Haitian birth mother called her.

I feel like I just won First Prize in The Name Game.