Baby names, my mom's name story

I wrote about how my name was chosen. But names often have reason, a story behind them. My daughter carries my mom's middle name. My son carries his father's name as his middle name, which is also a passed on name. We often name children after individuals that we look up to, or see as a role model, or out of respect, or a cultural norm. Two of my cousin's paid homage to our biological grandfather, who passed before any of us were born, with their children's names.

My mother was the first of her siblings. I think there is a lot of stress in naming your first child. It is possible this stress comes from the fact you have never done it before. It is also possible because people in your life expect you to pick certain names. My mother was named after her great-grandmother on her father's side. I do not remember ever asking my grandmother if this was a woman who meant something to my grandfather, or if it was a name she liked, or how it was picked. But my mom knew she was named after her great grandmother.

My mom grew up in a small town. And on Sundays, the family went to the cemetery after church to take care of the family graves. This is where her great-grandmother was buried. Which meant every Sunday my mom looked upon her name on a gravestone. Her exact name. She told me growing up it would creep her out to see it. Now, this is not something easy for a child to empathize with. It is not like I was going to find my exact name on any gravestone. Mainly because most of my dad's family with our last name were not here in the United States. And the closest I came to having someone with my name was my dad's cousin's daughter, who has my same first name. My dad's cousin, however, has my dad's exact name. We reference them by where they live if we are talking about family on the large scale.

Back to my mom's name creeps. As a child I couldn't understand how my mother couldn't just identify that this woman was not her, dead, and her name sake. As I grew up, I learned about how my mom's imagination worked. In that my mom would see something and then connect it to her own life to have that empathy that I was missing. She did it from a young age. In fact, when she read a book about Florence Nightingale at the age of 10, she knew she would be a nurse. She planned it forward and followed through. Taking this in to account, I can now see that my young mom would see her name and attaching it to her own life wasn't hard as it was in fact her name etched in the stone there in front of her.

My mother was such a scientist, and was very fact based. But this is one of her little quirks that is such an intrigue to me. And one that I think I have, just with a bit more of an ability to separate my forward planning from my imagined events.