Names, Part 3

I have loved my own name, the middle one, that is, Carol. I don’t dislike Alyce, went by it all through my public school education, and gave it to my second daughter. But Carol is my real, my true name. It is a song, and my mother used to say that she gave me the name because I was her little song. I like that story, but mostly I just like the name for me.

My mother was Lola. It’s not a common name, not heard much, but I liked it for my mother, and when my first daughter was born on my mother’s birthday, I named her Lola.

There was a 69-year gap between those two namings. I wondered if my daughter would like her name, its old-fashioned quality. I hoped she would like sharing her grandma’s name. But it might be possible, I thought, that she would hate it. Her friends were Lisas, Julies, Jennys, and Stephanies. Lola clearly marked her as not of the cute name crowd; sometimes that’s hard for a kid to live with.

Not Lola. She loves her name, always did, even though her brothers called her loaf and many have called her Lola granola (I was often Carol-barrel). But those things don’t matter if you like your name. If it fits you. And Lola fits her. It’s hers alone. She knows no one else with the name and likes it that way. Good.

And, while I’m on this small and quite pointless discussion of my children’s names, Alyce likes her name, and Ann likes hers, except that she is our only child without a middle name, and that made her mad when she was a little girl. She got over it.

My boys? Wayne, Paul, Andrew, and Richard. I thought they were all happy with their names, even though I knew Andrew did not like his middle name, Harold. I was surprised and a little saddened to learn that he doesn't like Andrew all that much either. Wow. I am sorry.