Word: namee
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...friend actually suggested to me once that I forego my name entirely. “Just pick a symbol,” he said. “Like Prince. You could be ‘The Harvard Student Formerly Known as Zane...
During my mom’s entire pregnancy, my parents knew I was a girl, but they kept this strictly on the down low to avoid incessant interference from my relatives on choosing a name. They ended up using the gender-neutral “Zane” to refer to me to avoid giving the secret away, and it stuck for the duration. “Zane” was also a family name, belonging to a female relative from a disputed number of generations before...
There was just one obstacle in the path to making it official: my mom, in all of her hormonal and high-risk pregnancy bliss, mandated that I be named after her-much-beloved-Aunt-but-not-actually-an-aunt Henrietta, whom I never had the opportunity to meet to verify that claim. My father would have preferred to keep the extant name for simplicity and, well, pragmatic reasons. My parents decided to compromise and use both names, but call me by my middle name. (For the record, “Bratton” is my mom’s last...
...course, I am certainly not the only person who has foregone his or her first name for a middle one. I’ve always wondered what N. Gregory Mankiw’s story is. In eighth grade, one classmate confessed in an English essay that he, too, was harboring a secret first name that he chose not to use. Even Zane Grey dropped his real first name—Pearl—in favor of his middle name...
...gotten better over the years at accepting the inherent confusions that my name brings. I just smile in silence when the Greenhouse Café card swiper chirps, “Have a nice day, Henrietta!” Or when someone I meet up with for the first time in Lamont exclaims with shock, “I wasn’t expecting you to be a girl!” I can laugh it off and say, truthfully, that it happens all the time...