Tangled Names

You know how when you say a word too much, you start to forget what it means? Everyone does this. It's really fun if you do it with your own name. You find yourself sitting there thinking: Who is that? How can that be the name of anything? How can that have been my name my whole life and I'm only now just hearing how ridiculous it is?! Or at least I do. My name is not ridiculous. It's not terribly common for my particular age group. It is related to a much more common name which I get called quite often and it grates. Oddly, though, my real name doesn't get used much.

My mom calls me by it occasionally, but as we mostly talk on phones with caller ID, she already knows it's me and just says "Hi." or "Hi honey."

My dad rarely ever called me by my full name. He was the only one who was ever allowed to shorten it or make a diminutive out of it. He also called my by my sister's name or sometimes my brother's as parents are sometimes apt to do.

My kids call me Mama, sometimes Mom. Never Mommy. Sometimes they call me by my first name. It sounds so funny in their little mouths, so I let them. I don't hold to old notions of disrespect and it is, in fact, my name. They probably use it more than anyone, but even they don't use it that often.

My punk-face junior high students call me Mrs. and I let them. They think I'm old and horrible because I have gray hair and children and no iPhone and I make them read things for understanding. No one else calls me Mrs. That is someone else's name.

The parents, teachers and students at my daughter's school call me jBird's Mom, which suits me fine. She is far more memorable than I am and any capacity in which those people know me, it is unnecessary for them to know me personally, only the function I serve as jBird's mom. Ditto my son's school. Except the children there are mostly at an age where they don't know anyone's name anyway, or care. And I avoid their parents because they frighten me with loud baby talk and fur coats.

I have a friend who calls me Roxy, a friend who calls me Buttercup, a friend who calls me Esther, another who calls me Special K. All very old nicknames from different origins, times and places. They are perhaps the only ones besides my husband who have had nicknames adhere to me.

My husband calls me Lou. I call my husband Lou. It's a habit started in our first year of marriage. It comes from One Legged Lou - the name of the finger I use to poke my husband when he's sleeping, just to startle him. I'm annoying that way. It also comes from Lou Dominguez - the man whose mail my mother-in-law started to receive after living in her house for well over 20 years. We created a back story for him and my mother-in-law that was profoundly funny. At least we thought so.

We have called each other Lou so long that we forget when we say it in front of other people and they are surprised. When both kids were first learning to talk, Lou was among their first words. My jBird would stand in her crib and holler "Llllooooouuuu!" in the sweetest little voice if ever I dared to put her down for a nap in that little baby cage. The Hooligan was much more terse. He would point to me and say "Wou!" and then point to his daddy and say "Wou!"

My dad tried to call my husband Lou once and it was so awkward that we all just blushed silently for a minute and then never spoke of it again.

We knew before we were ever pregnant with the jBird what her name would be. The Hooligan's name was not solidified until a few hours after he was born. We carefully chose their names for very specific reasons and then after they were born proceeded to call them by a series of nicknames anyway. My sister-in-law said that jBird wouldn't know what her name was because we never called her by it. But she did. Very early on, she did. Same for the Hooligan.

I protect our names online because you never know who might be reading or what they might do with the information they do read. I find this a little silly and paranoid, but I'm told it's a good idea. I will be silly if it means protecting my children. I am silly for far less important reasons sometimes. So online I am Tangled Lou, decidedly silly. Tangled because that is the state of my mind, my tongue and my writing a lot of times. Tangled because of my knitting obsession. Tangled because the play on words is too irresistible with the Bob Dylan song, Tangled Up In Blue.

But somehow in this state of tangled names, with each their own source, their own piece of me, there in the center of it all is just Me. The Me that no matter how much I repeat it, does not begin to sound ridiculous. The Me that friends from grade school still recognize. The Me in whom my mom still sees shadows of the baby I was. The Me that I recognize no matter what the outward circumstances of my life. The Me that does not change. This is the Me that I embrace with all of her flaws and idiosyncratic ways, with her brilliance and her silliness, with her monstrous thoughts and tender heart, with her knowing and her wonder, with her naivete and her wisdom, with her intensity and heat, with her hideousness and beauty. This is the Me that has been there for as long as I can remember, the Me that no one can touch. And honestly, I don't really know how to pronounce her name.