Forty-eight years ago I lost my name. More accurately, I gave my name away. I let it go eagerly, like a balloon released into the sky or like a stone dropped from a cliff into the ocean. I had no idea I'd miss it, and I didn't miss it for years. Ten years after I gave my name away, I had the chance to gain it back, and I didn't take it. I liked my new name better. Then four years after that another chance, almost an imperative to recover my name presented itself, but I rejected it as well.
My mother, especially, loved the name she gave me at my birth. Mary Jane. Mary to honor the mother of Jesus. Jane in gratitude to Dr. Lutton who saved Mom's life and mine during her toxic pregnancy and delivery. His daughter's name was Jane. My name defied nicknames. A boyfriend, once, decided to call me Janie, but it didn't stick. My Aunt Mary called me by her own name, "Mary," but she was the only one, and it always sounded odd to my ears.
In 1958 I entered a convent, and nine months later, in the ceremony during which I received the veil and habit of the Sisters, I also received a new name. "Mary Jane is dead," the Monsignor who was standing in for the Bishop proclaimed. "In religion you will be called Sister Mary Christopher." Christopher had been Mom's idea. She took seriously her self-imposed responsibility for keeping her own beloved "traveler" safe. Dad was a bush pilot in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada, and she'd dangled a silver St. Christopher medal inside the cockpit of his 180 Cessna. In my nun's habit and veil, I was intended as another reminder, a living talisman dangling before the face of God, reminding him to keep Dad's plane safely in the sky.
Catholic Church renewal encouraged nuns to doff their masculine names and either return to their family names or take a feminine form of their religious name. Sister Stephan might become Stephanie. Just as I was about to resurrect Mary Jane, a friend said, "What are you thinking? The kids will call you Pot!" I was teaching eighth graders. They most likely would have. So what would it be? Krista? Christa? Christine? Kristen? AH! Christin. Sister Mary Christin. Perfect.
Just as I began feeling comfortable in that name, four years later, I dropped the "Sister" by leaving the convent. But did I resurrect Mary Jane? Not on your life! The kids were still smoking marijuana, weren't they? So for a while I was simply Christin Lore. Then I got married and was Christin Lore-Kelly. This was the point at which I finally had my name legally changed. "You have got to do something about your name," said the accountant at work. The SSN needed to match the name on the paycheck. OK. Off to the judge and a completely legal farewell to Mary Jane. No more danger of "Pot;" not ever. I thought I was done. But a few years later the Kelly part of me died. Before long I was married to my high school sweetheart—a Weber. Seemed a good place to stop. "Lore" was the piece of myself I'd always wanted to keep. It meant "story." Now with "Weber," I could be "Story-Weaver."
I just applied for Social Security. Do you know how many AKAs that is? Every single name needs listing.
So what happened to Mary Jane? She's in my dreams. She talks to me inside my head. She's my childhood, my past, something of myself rarely mentioned except by cousins who couldn't make the adjustment to my convent life way back forty-eight years ago. So up comes Mary Jane when I call them on the phone. When I'm with them, Christin seems a pen-name, almost an affectation. With those who know me only as Mary Jane I am someone that I used to be and lost along the way. Cousin Nancy calls me "My Mary Jane," and I smile, feeling like I'm nine years old.
In many cultures children don't receive their adult names until childhood is over and it is clear who they will be in the world. When I read Jhumpa Lahiri's THE NAMESAKE, I recognized something of my own experience in Gogol's shifts back and forth between those two names of his. Sometimes I'm sad to know I bent to such silly pressure to reject Mary Jane when I could have had her back. At other times I'm glad she's safe within me. Life is complex. That's what Mary Jane has taught me. Maybe it's not so bad that each era is met with a slightly different name. In the end all the names are stored like treasure somewhere in the soul, recalling, when we remember them, some small portion of the almost infinite variation one individual contains.
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 27
Chris, I agree that name changing often has something to do with struggle. I think of it as identity struggle. Just look at the Internet names people choose for themselves--it turns the struggle into a form of play. We express this part for a while, then that part.
Thank you both for your comments.
Love you, Christin MJ (yet another cousin not wishing to drop the Mary Jane completely.)
marilyn
Then when an adult myself, you were Chris, and that felt right. Sissy felt too juvenile, and was relagated to the past along with my own childhood name. A sister by any other name, is loved as much.
even your comments ring with insight: 'it turns the struggle into a form of play.' i had about ten msn nicnames when i helped run a trivia community a few years back and it really was a playful way of delving into different parts of me and exploring who i could be with anonymous abandon.
thankyou for sharing this Christin.
And Liz! How could I have omitted "Sissy"? You were the most tender and loving little sister anyone could have wished for. Then "Chris" -- the moment when you finally referred to me by name. I was Chris to everyone in Minnesota (and still am) but first and foremost and mostly to you--always. Character is diamond, isn't it? Many faceted. Multitudinously named. Maybe every time someone speaks our name and it comes from that person's heart, it is slightly different. Maybe the tone is different. Maybe it is a term of endearment. The names our parents used -- Buckshot! Schnickelfritz! (Is that the way to spell it?) I still am Sissy--sometimes.
Thanks to you, too, Carolyn--and also for mentioning the Gypsy Sarah stories. You printed them out???? I'm honored! For the past two weeks I haven't been round Gather much because I've done two (yes, TWO) revisions of the novel Sarah lives in. I'm almost ready to send it to an interested editor at a university press.
I read assiduously the comments expecting to find the "Rose by any other name" phrase. Instead I found a couple of lovely other ones, one of which I shall try to incorporate into my daily usage -- "I've got to find that braincell and work out where I put them." Carolyn's phrase. And I have many occasions to find braincells. Searching for words, for instance. I always eschew declaring "I can't remember", in favor of the subliminal programming in "It will come to me"
Your phrase about standing on tiptoe at the very edge of life, about to pass over into the mystery of love that lies beyond, is a little poetry disguised to look like prose. I can't imagine having many occasions to use it, but I don't want to let it go. And, given the frequent need to search for those damned elusive braincells, it nudged me toward creating a new file to collect such nice turns of phrase.
But I digress. Your article, beautiful as all your others, has set me pondering the mystery of how we are so different now, in my case at age 63, but somehow we are still the same as we always were. I haven't changed my name, so I don't get the benefit of triggering recall. I remember once seeing my youngest, with long blond hair flying, racing down the soccer field, and thinking I once was like him. Now most of the hair is gone, but, somehow I am still the same person. I still yearn to play soccer and fly down the field. I know what it's like.
Cheers.
Jim
You'll always be the same person, I expect, and the world is better off for it!
There is a powerful mathematical-statistical set of techniques known as Markov Models. The general feature of the set is sort of related to an interesting 'independence' criterion in important kinds of problems. One starts with an arbitrary condition (known as an Initial Condition) and feeds it through what is referred to as a Transition Probability Matrix (think of a life of experience) and out comes a Final Solution referred to as a 'Steady State Solution which is entirely independent of the Initial Condition. In other words, the initial condition has truly helped to create the outcome, and the outcome (via the multiplicity of finite time movements) turns out to be FINAL and STABLE in a technical sense sometimes referred to as nearly ISOMORPHIC. However, one remains still free in a sense refered to as ASYMPTOTICALLY converged.
THUS? Mary Jane is ever imbedded in Christin Lore Weber as a contributor and a creator of one's new and eternally emerging self. Is this God's way by which a person passes through all the necessary stages that start with a Tabula Rasa logic and then into a Kantian/Hegelian Final Spiritual and eternally stable human, finite true PERSON? A dynamically FREE and finite human divine entity?
In your case, I think -- "YES"!
Dick
Cin, Original Sin and Cinners. They all fit..but I am encouraged by your article to do a freewrite on my many names. You are an inspiration!!
Cindy
In 1995, I threw Carol away. Threw her out of the window and shut the door. I have never been sorry. And I never will be.
RIP Carol, You so needed to go.
Sam
Love, Carol
I love that you're posting again. :) I get the little pop ups in my email, and I, like a sheep, come to gather to read your postings like they are my shepard. :) *giggle*
LOVE YOU!
Your Uncle John adapted fast. He still calls me Mary Jane sometimes, though, and then time crashes into itself and we are 18 again.
Love you, too.
You may not be aware; as you were not a "Range" Lore; but did you notice that by and large, none of us had much in that line until we started school and other kids changed Robert and Donald to Bob and Don; and later Bob to Deacon(!!). We used both first and middle of Helen's names, Connie's, Donna's and yours and later, and for his entire life Harvey John was Harvey John. Patty and Betsy got shortened, as did Ricky. I don't know how they managed it except they were all either the youngest boy, or girl or child!!! The Youngs with nicknames were merely the common shortened versions of their given names, and not all of them had shortened names either.
There is nothing one can do really, to shorten my name. . .except I had one friend who decided she would call me "Mare". . .that did not fly. . .I simply refused to respond, intentionally in this case. . .I could foresee the upcoming "Hey, old-grey-mare, what's up". Thank you, No. Furthermore, by this time I was an adult. . .thank goodness no one thought of that back in school!!!
So, I went from Marilyn Joyce Anderson to Marilyn Joyce Hertel; and have now been Hertel for 47 years and was Anderson for a paltry 21 and a half. . .it was a very serious name change.
I neither like nor dislike my name, it's just my name. It is not who I am, it is not a description. It tells no one even one thing about me, except perhaps that in grade school I always sat in the first row If they know the maiden name)!!! Am I short or tall? Dark or fair haired? Brown eyed or blue? Heavy-set? Thin? Betwix and between?
It is easy for me to call you Christin MJ when writing; but in person, as on the phone, Mary Jane is what flows from my brain to my mouth and out it comes. I'm sure it would be the same with Liz.
Well goodness. . .I was just going to mention that I never had a nickname and only one name change due to marriage!! I tend to get carried away sometimes.
Sorry!! And to all of your Gather friends, too.
Love you bunches. . .take care and God bless.
mjh
Marilyn, I didn't know all that about the names of cousins from the "Range." (That's the Iron Range in Minnesota, for those in Gather who don't recognize the nickname. You know: where Bob Dylan came from!) Your thoughts brought an additional realization about my own several names. I tend to identify myself to people or communities by the name they call me. There's a definite feeling as I say the name, as though it is a bond between us or a cord that holds us connected. I just spent a few days with my cousin, Sal, at the ocean. She has held tenaciously to "Mary Jane," and while I'm with her it never occurs to me that I have any other name than that. My different names seem to have tone qualities or vibrations that harmonize with specific people and situations.
Thanks, Marilyn, for another opportunity to think about all this.