What’s in a Name 6 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

“Change name” has been on my to-do list since my wedding day, October 2, 2004. With a new baby coming, a new list was made, and I moved the errand once more to the top. It suddenly seemed terribly important to me to have the same name as my husband and children.

Plus my Indiana driver’s license was due to expire, so I knew I’d have to make that dreaded trip to the Virginia DMV anyway. Might as well hit the social security office, too.

Waiting to hear my number called, I tried to put my finger on why I’d been dragging my feet, reluctant to take, at least legally, a new name. It wasn’t uncertainty about the marriage, or about Dave’s family; I was eager to take on both. I even liked the sound of the name, the image it brought to mind of the mythical Gryphon, the fact that it has Welsh roots and its own tartan.

I certainly didn’t see it as a forfeit of my selfhood in the patriarchal institution of marriage. At least not exactly.

Inspecting my birth certificate, I felt another surge of sentimental reluctance to let go of the name my mother had given me. If she were still alive, our relationship evidenced by more than this piece of paper from the State of Louisiana, I doubt I would have hesitated for so long. Sharing her name, or at least her surname, which is my father’s name, too, and bearing the name they gave me together seemed like the last living testament to that relationship, to all her hopes and dreams for the person I would become.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this in the last few months (Dave is laughing hysterically at that understatement; my bedside table is nothing but name books and essays or books about naming, and every time he comes in the room I look up and say, Bonaventure Griffith? Or something equally terrible).

The indecision is bringing on a panic. We’ve got to name this child in the next three weeks. Maybe less.

It’s important to me that he has a family name, something to give him a sense of history and tradition, of coming from somewhere, being a part of something. I also want him to have a saint’s name, a patron to depend upon, to call to his side for eternity at his baptism. But I also want to acknowledge his new and particular life, his story. And of course, there are our hopes for him, our dreams of who he might be, who he might become.

That’s enough to chew on, and the task of naming looms as a huge responsibility. Add to it more minor considerations, like location—Dave keeps pointing out that my dramatic taste in boy names will be a curse on the playground in Amherst County, Virginia (so I guess Bonaventure is out)—and a husband who just wants to pass on his own name, which is also his father’s name (to which I respond with one of our daughter’s favorite poems, Dr. Seuss’s “Too Many Daves.”)

Did my parents consider so much when they named me? I can guess where they took their inspiration. It was the 70s; they had a daughter named Jennifer, after Ali McGraw’s character in Love Story, my mom’s favorite actress and movie; it came out the year before my sister was born and sent the name soaring to the top of the Social Security charts.

Jessica was the popular, euphonic sibling match. It was also the name of an Allmann Brothers song, which would have appealed to my dad. My middle name, Leigh—again, pretty standard fare in the 70s—was probably a nod to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, another of my mother’s favorites. I do love classic rock, but otherwise my name has always seemed a bit off the mark, a little too dramatic and glamorous for a tall, tomboyish and awkward kid. Everyone calls me Jess now, which is more comfortable. I wonder, though, how much the name has influenced my self-conception.

“Are [our proper names] merely arbitrary and conventional handles that serve simply to designate and uniquely pick us out of a crowd?” Amy and Leon Kass, professors at the University of Chicago, wonder in their article, “What’s Your Name?” “Or do our names, like those given by God, have power to shape our lives?”

“God's naming...brings order to chaos, the discrete to the continuous, definition to the indefinite, shapely and recognizable form to the merely qualitative,” they argue. I think this is one reason I’ve wanted to name the baby in the womb, to give him a recognizable form in my imagination, to transform him from the nameless, unknowable every-baby to my baby. But it’s not so much an act of possession; it’s an act of definition.

Maybe that’s what led me, finally, to take the name of my husband and children in the eyes of the social security administration. When I waddled out of our local branch, nine months pregnant and holding the hand of my four-year-old (Charlotte Mary Kinsey Griffith) it felt like I’d married Dave all over again, and I felt a surge of happiness, of belonging. Taking their name didn’t mean giving up my identity, but choosing to define it.