More Mom Thoughts...

We often spend months putting together just the right combination of names for our soon-to-arrive babies.

Have you ever thought about the way we use it after they come? I’ve had lots of time to think about that. My early life experience molded my thinking on it considerably.

I was adopted at 10 into a family that already had a daughter with my name. She was six years older than I. She was called, simply, by that single name. I became the combination of first and middle names. My name was spoken with a different tone than hers - there was a tone of impatience and sometimes exasperation that surrounded my name when it was called. I’ve never forgotten all the things that said to me.

So, I think lots these days about the way I speak my children’s names. Who would have guessed it would matter, that it would tell them so much about who they were?

Said in exasperation often enough, a child learns to dislike hearing the sound of his name, feeling he is only "something to be dealt with”.

Spoken gently, it can become a fond beckoning, conjuring a feeling of belonging and importance.

As a child grows and others begin to use their name, they already have feeling attached to it.

I remember a journalism teacher I had in the tenth grade. I had a tendency to occasionally “zone out”; stare without realizing it, in an almost trance-like state. (We later discovered it was part of a mini-seizure disorder.) One day that happened to me in class and the object of my stare was she. Ugh. She spoke my name in a way that still causes me to shrivel when it rings through my memories.

My family, my friends and that teacher forever changed the way I viewed something so simple as speaking a name.

I try to choose my tone carefully as I can when I speak my children’s names, particularly. I want them to feel comfortable hearing the sound of it and embrace how it feels. I guess I consider it a gift as special as the name I chose for them.