The Vine: May 15, 2007
Hey Sars,
We’re in the process of adopting our first child, and have already chosen names for boy and girl. I have had some strange looks on our girl’s name, Edith Michael, but it has meaning for us and we’re going with it. My mom’s best friend, Edith, died of lung cancer about five years ago, and she was like a second mom to me and my mom’s name is Michael, which is also my grandmother’s maiden name.
The only person who is passionately against the name is my mom. First of all, she says that Edith is an ugly name and that our kid is going to have enough to deal with being adopted and a different race than we are, and we should name her something plain and common so she doesn’t have to deal with it. She is most passionate about the middle name, though, and says that her name caused her pain throughout her life and having a middle name that is traditionally a boy’s name will be hurtful to our child.
You have a traditionally male name as your middle name, is it that big of a deal? I’m beginning to think maybe I don’t want to honor my mom by using her name anymore.
Why did I even tell her in the first damn place?
Dear Because You Didn’t Think She’d Be A Neurotic Bitch About It,
…Jesus. No, it was not a big deal. It was not a deal, period. Here’s the only time it ever even came up: in my cohort, growing up, when someone “jinxed” you, it meant you couldn’t talk until the jinxer said your full name, and mine took longer to guess because jinxers tended to assume that I’d have a girl’s middle name.
This does not qualify as a tragedy. It…just doesn’t.
More interesting to me is why your mother is getting so crotchy about the names to begin with. “Edith” is a lovely name, but whether she approves or not, it’s not really her place to (over-)react so negatively to it — why couldn’t she just have nodded and smiled?
She’s making this about her, and she’s using the non-issue of the boy’s name to get in digs at you about adopting a child of a different race, is what I think. Giving a girl child a boy middle name is not “hurtful”; it’s standard operating procedure for a lot of people. The question is whether you want to dignify your mother’s controlling rudeness by using that boy’s name. Hell, use “Douglas” instead, if you want. I don’t mind sharing.
Tags: the fam
