A principle often used in theoretical physics is Occam’s razor, attributed to the fourteenth-century logician whose name it bears. The principle holds that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” It was later refined by Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote in Principia Mathematica: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”
Michael had raised the principle of Occam’s razor to me early in my struggle to understand what my parents had known. He told me that a popular follow-up statement in the scientific realm is “When you have two competing theories that make the exact same predictions, the simpler one is the better.” I rebelled against the notion at first—reflexively, self-protectively. Nothing about my discovery was simple, and for a long while it felt safer to weave byzantine stories about deception, cover-ups, and intrigue, since these felt closer to the shock of my experience.
But scientific method eventually became a key component in my arrival at a resting place, a narrative of sorts, distrusting of narratives as I had become, for the likeliest story. The simplest explanation for my parents’ pilgrimage to the Farris Institute was that Edmond Farris was known for his use of sperm donors. Full stop. Treatments, boosts, the thicket of euphemism aside, this was what Farris did. And so wherever on that slide rule of consciousness versus denial that my parents found themselves, there was knowledge. Deep knowledge. Buried knowledge. In the case of my mother, I believe, acute dissociation when it came to the truth of who I was and where I came from.
As much as the most painful parts of my discovery had to do with my father—giving me insight into his depression, his physical and psychic pain, his decline—my mother was, of course, at the center of it. Though I had spent far more time thinking about what this meant for my dad, my mother had been the engine. She was active. He was melancholy, passive. She was someone who would never have taken no for an answer. His life had been lived as if “no” had been shouted at him since the day he was born. It was my mother who would have done the research and found Edmond Farris, rogue scientist, man with a plan. It was my mother who would have made the appointment. And if there was convincing to do—if the conversation ever became detailed and honest, conscious—it would have been my mother who would have done the convincing.
But then I was born, and whatever sequelae there might have been to the unorthodox methods surrounding my conception vanished into the ether of magical thinking. If it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t so. If it wasn’t spoken, it hadn’t happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them. A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”
“I gave you life!” my mother screamed at me whenever she was at her angriest, when I wasn’t complying with her wishes or to her will. “I gave you life!” I had always found it borderline funny, but also disturbing, that my mother felt the need to underscore this bedrock parental fact. On each of my birthdays as an adult, I was meant to call her—it never occurred to me that it was usually the other way around—and thank her for having me. But here were the noxious fumes, leaking from beneath the sealed door where the truth resided.
She named me Daneile. Not Danielle. Not a plain name like Lisa or Wendy—or, come to think of it, Susie—something simple and easy to pronounce. Not a biblical name like Sarah or Rebecca. Not a family name, of which there had been some perfectly fine ones: Anna, Beatrice. In Moses: A Human Life, the biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes that “classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection.” What had my mother made of this opportunity to name her child who was already being born into such unusual circumstances? She was proud of her originality, her ingenuity in choosing a name for me that had never been chosen before. In recent months I typed my own name into Names.org to see if perhaps there might be a hint as to its origins.
Out of 5,743,017 in the United States social security public data, the name Daneile was not present. You simply have a name that no one else in America is using. For 136 years, only your parents have thought of using your name. Hoorah! You are a unique individual.
Another trenchant line from the psychoanalyst Bollas: “We learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.” He’s speaking of infancy, of course, and the underpinnings of our psyches. The grammar of my being—the mortar into which words would eventually settle—was formed by a mother who had shoved the truth of me away from her so forcefully that all that was left was a chasm, the tender ground just after a quake. Her trembling eyes, her practiced smile, trained on me. Insisting, from minute one, that I was different, special, other, and, above all, hers.
Daneile. Pronounced Da-neel. It was a name that called attention to itself—that required an explanation. It stopped people. I had to spell it out for official documents, or when making travel reservations, and still, more often than not, airplane tickets would arrive for Danielle, Danelle, Danyelle, Daniele. I’d be stopped in security lines when the discrepancy was noticed. All my life—in addition to being asked how it was possible that I was Jewish—I was asked if Dani was my real name. Yes, I would say. It took too much out of me to explain. Sometimes I would add that I had never thought of myself as Daneile, not once, not even as a child. I never answered to it. But was this true? Try as I might, I couldn’t ask the child I once was what she understood about herself, in the grammar of her being, before the rules of her language set in.