In the Name of Love
“How do you pronounce it?” Asked 63% of the people I have interacted with to date.
In a desolate and rural town way outside of Chicago, on the first day of kindergarten, my teacher stopped class to mispronounce my name only a handful of times before giving up completely. All I wanted to do was crawl behind the cubby wall and never come out as the children stared at the kid with the weird name. Do parents understand the impact their choice of baby names will bring into their child’s life, after all the snuggly, cozy days are behind them, and the kid is released into the world to be judged first by this choice? Probably not. Why had I been given this complicated name that nobody could ever get right? It would be many years before I would understand.
Three moves and two continents later, when I was in 6th grade, I discovered a piece of paper, off-white with tattered edges, that would bring about a chain-reaction of thoughts that would alter the way I would perceive life in the decades to come. Next to my father’s death certificate sat my birth certificate. My name, but an altered spelling, one that had been crossed off in a simple slash and housed a new one directly beneath it. Always fascinated with backstories, I asked my mother why my name had been changed from the “normal” way to this odd version.
They were already parents to a toddler boy, she said, and wanted their family “complete” with this second child and hoped for a girl. My father spoke about the baby in her womb and so very much wished for a girl. He knew what her name would be. The day came, the girl was born, and the name was given. But once the name was released from his lips to the nurse taking it down for public records, he was no longer sure if the way he had chosen to spell it would do justice to the name and could guarantee the proper pronunciation. After all, the name was Arabic and needed to be converted into English. He agonized over it for weeks, then did what he needed to. He wrote letters, made phone calls, and fought to have the name redone. And it was.
I know for a fact that the spelling he eventually chose definitely does not get me the results he had worked towards. But what I do know is that three decades after his death, the fact that he took that much time and energy stressing over and finally picking my heavily-voweled, and nearly-impossible-to-pronounce-at-first name fills my heart with love each and every day. It gives me comfort to know that a large part of him lives with me every time someone utters my name, gets it wrong, or comments on how beautifully unique the spelling is.
I cannot help but wonder if somehow he knew that a decade after he had first held his much-anticipated baby girl in his arms, he would be gone from her life for good. That maybe he had caught a glimpse into her soul at that moment, when his eyes held hers, and knew that this would be the child who would suffer greatly from his loss, and that she would need something solid, something that was only hers, to get her through.
The name would do.
