What's In a Name?

And what do we owe the people who gave them to us?

I was at the kitchen table having pasta with pesto—I always had pasta with pesto—when my roommate came through the door balancing an oversized cardboard box in her arms.

“Package for you,” she said, sliding it on the table next to my bowl. “They misspelled your name, though.”

“Hmm?” I looked at the address label, where my mom’s neat handwriting spelled out Nikki. “Oh, no,” I said. “We just spell it differently.”

Her face twisted up in amused confusion. “What? Why?”

I proceeded to tell her what I told you last week, adding this one extra detail. My parents weren’t thrilled with the way I chose to spell my name. I understood: They were my parents, and they’d seen fit to spell my name a certain way, and I didn’t want to offend them any more than I already had by choosing a different spelling.

So, for the last thirty years, my parents and I have spelled my name in two different ways. I sign their birthday cards Nik or Nikki, and they address things to me in the same way most of the time. It’s not a problem, just a silly quirks of becoming my own independent, autonomous adult with parents who still have opinions.

I have always identified with the name my parents gave me, but the idea of names got really weird for me when I had kids. The first time I was pregnant, the idea of naming a human before I got to know them was really intimidating. Picking out names for all of our kids before they ever made their way into the world just seemed so arbitrary. What if, after a while, the name just doesn’t seem to fit? Or do kids just grow into their names eventually?

When I was pregnant with my youngest, my husband read to the two oldest each night from a book series called The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich. It was a wonderful middle-grade historical fiction series about a little girl named Omakayas from the Ojibwe tribe in the Lake Superior region during the mid-19th century. As the story developed and Omakayas’ baby brother grew up, he was given several different names that suited him at the time. That’s not something we typically do in my culture, but it just makes so much sense!

As my girls grow into tweens and preteens, I’m noticing a lot more fluidity with names. Some people change their names as a part of a gender transition to become their true selves. Some explore different names as a part of trying to figure out who they are. I have a friend whose two children seem to have different names every time we talk. And she’s so cool with it! I don’t know her children personally, and so I can’t keep them straight, and I admire her for being able to. One of my daughters has tried on a handful of names already, but I can’t bring myself to call her anything but the name we gave her.

But why? The weirdness of names is nothing new to me. I felt uncomfortable naming my children before I knew them 12 and 10 years ago. I have friends—and my kids have friends—who go by new names, and I have no problem calling them by whatever name they choose. So why, when my child asked me to call her something new, did I say no? She didn’t consent to this name. If she doesn’t like it and wants to try something else, why should I care? Why can’t I be more like my friend and just roll with it?

I suppose it feels like a rejection of me and her dad when she wants to change the name we gave her. Even though we named her in the car on the way home from a doctor’s appointment when she wasn’t even half-cooked.

Maybe I should be more understanding, considering the minor audits I’ve done to my own name over the years, but those didn’t change the substance of the name my parents decided I would have; they were just a disagreement on the details. I can’t really put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t feel their name fits who they are—and it’s hard to even say whether this is the case with my kid, or if she’s just playing around with her identity and trying things on to see if anything sticks.

There’s no real ending to this story, other than my observation of names having become more fungible over time and the defensiveness I feel about the ones I arbitrarily placed on the miniature humans I brought into this world. But I’d love to hear your thoughts. Why is it so hard for parents to adapt? Is it (or would it be) like this for you too? Tell us all about it in the comments.

Talk soon,