“A Name Foreign”

By Audrey T. Carroll

 

A Name Foreign

We’re talking about naming practices in families, how four of five generations of Heffers had a Thomas straight down the line, how the last name evolved after Ellis Island. In my family—both sides—we tend to flip names, especially women’s names—Jacqueline Mary swapped for Mary Jacqueline, Theresa Audrey swapped for Audrey Theresa. My daughter didn’t inherit her first name; her middle name, though, comes from her Auntie Angela, my sister-of-choice whose middle name I know because of a sleepover at age 13. Allegedly the name—Noelle—is one that my brother almost got because he was born in December and they thought he’d be a girl from his quick heartrate, but I swear that I always heard how my name was going to be either Samantha or Noelle and that this was what I was told from before I could even remember clearly, like I can hear the family folk tale in the same way as you can see the sun through stained glass in a church window.

My grandmother was a nun before she was a mother, before a doctorate and four girls raised in Queens. (It’s important that you know this for the story to make sense.) She named her firstborn—my mother—after the nearest saint’s day. My mother was born on August 14th; the assumption of Mary is the 15th.

We began to wonder what our names would be if this had been the protocol for all of us. My husband might have traded Doubting Thomas for Blaise, tortured martyr and patron of healing, animals, babies, and builders, or maybe it would’ve flipped his name to John Thomas for John de Britto, whose martyrblood was said to stain sands in India red and bless them with healing. (Instead: named primarily for the pitcher Tommy John, who has a surgery named after him that involves surgical grafts and ligaments.) I would have swapped “Audrey, like Hepburn” for “Monica, and no I wasn’t named after the sitcom,” patron saint of unhappy wives and mothers and victims of abuse, and maybe my middle name’s spelling would change, too (Teresa of Jesus Ibars, patroness of those rejected by religious orders).

My daughter might have been Rita after the patroness of lost causes, a woman who solved her family’s vendetta with prayers answered by dysentery and plague. I know my daughter: she would have either accused us of having named her after the Power Rangers villain, or she would have insisted that the villain was, in fact, named after her. Instead: Anna, meaning grace. Not named for anyone or anything, but simply because I’ve liked how soft it sounds, the symmetry of letters, since I was 14. If she was assigned male at birth, she would have been John Stanley, after my husband’s grandfather, and we would have called her Jack. But even Anna has connections—her name, meaning grace, tied to her great-aunt Agnes Grace who died decades before I could meet her.

Because this is what naming is: a connective tissue, past to present, culture to child, a lineage that can be traced, a way to say you are ours, to write a future with desires for what that little life will one day become.

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