9  THE NAMES WE GIVE

A YEAR OR SO AGO I WAS ON AN AIRPLANE flying to meet up with a small group of female Christian activists. I was transfixed as the woman next to me took out a small tin filled with squares of chalky paint. She had a clear plastic brush filled with water, and she started to make a tiny replica of the view outside the plane window. She was in the middle seat, so she had to crane her neck past me to get a good view for her work—the light blue sky, the cotton clouds, the red tip of the plane’s wing, the rounded oval frame of the window. She noticed my eyes sliding over to her work, and as she painted she started to talk quietly and pleasantly. She spoke of the old friends she was flying to see. Her love of watercolors happened later in life. Her only daughter, now about to graduate from high school. The changing of her life’s seasons, the wistfulness of new horizons.

She asked me about my destination. I told her where I was headed, but that I didn’t feel like I belonged. I felt like I wasn’t good enough for these amazing activist women. The confessions poured out of me, the plane a sacred and separate place, like a confessional booth in the sky. I heard myself telling this stranger that I never felt good enough, not ever, that I was afraid of harming the communities I most wanted to help because of my stubbornly ingrained savior complex, my ever-present desire to be found right. I told her that I was angry because the world was falling apart and scared that by trying to help I was only making it worse.

The woman made miniature brush strokes in blues and grays, dipping her brush into her repurposed box of mints. I have a friend like you, she told me. He started off small: trying not to buy anything with excess packaging, bicycling to work to cut down on carbon emissions. Now, she told me, looking me straight in the eye, now he refuses to buy toilet paper. She paused for a moment. He wipes his ass with his own hand, she said, as if to herself. She shook her head and went back to painting.

I sat quietly, thinking about this admission. I could see my life stretched out in front of me. I could see where all my good works would lead me, crippling me from enjoying the blue of the sky or the white of the clouds. I was tired of trying to pretend I was good, that I could control the chaos of the world with my small actions. But the problem was, I didn’t know how to stop.

Many of my Muslim friends can tell me, without hesitation, what their name means and how important it is to them. Most of their names have an Arabic root, which means many other people will also know exactly what their name means and even how to interact with them based on their name. Names are useful for positioning people, for understanding them, for helping identify where someone is placed in a community, perhaps even their personality, talents, and abilities.

The American in me still finds this weird. Isn’t everyone as unique as a snowflake? Perhaps, but viewed from a few feet away, humans do have similar characteristics and compulsions. My own cultural orientation toward extreme individualism (with an emphasis on being self-made) makes me distrust this belief in names and what they say about us and what they mean for our communities.

My middle name is Louise, after my great-grandmother. I know very little about this woman except that her house was a haven for my mother when she was small and her life was very hard. Great-Grandma Louise had a small house in Kansas that sheltered a girl from the storms of life, and that girl grew up to be my mom. Old-fashioned, archaic, stately: Louise is a name to grow into, a name worthy of being carried on.

My first name, Danielle, is the feminine version of Daniel, from the famous Bible story about a prophet and a den full of lions. It is a name that always seemed slightly ugly to me—too many letters and hard to pronounce. When I was a precocious seven-year-old I decided to make my name seem more sophisticated and went around telling anyone who would listen that the origins of my name were French. But really it was Hebrew, straight from the Old Testament; it means “God is my judge.” It’s a very good name if you are religious, and I have always been a very, very religious soul. I’ve always been severe, with a mind constantly roiling with questions about how to be good. Over time my name began to accrue meanings that would take decades to unwind.

As a child my nicknames given to me by my family were “the perfect child” and even “the holy spirit.” At the time I thought these nicknames were signs of my own goodness; I did not see the saltiness of a little girl who thought she could obtain the perfection of God if only she tried a little bit harder. I twisted the meaning of my name. I concluded that I was a judge. I would scour the Bible for stories of people who had done things right and strive to align myself in their ranks. I never stopped to consider what I was so afraid of. I never stopped to wonder what kind of Judge I was running from.

My name is connected to my story: I grew up idolizing the mostly single missionary women I read about as a child. They were so good, so right, and so very lonely. I believed that my name was mine alone to carry. Naturally, this led me to believe that I alone was responsible for judging the world and therefore for saving it too. My individualism grew in me a classic savior complex: a desperate longing to be of use, coupled with an inability to listen, love, or be transformed by others, especially those I wanted to help. My name became a source of anguish, a reminder of all the ways I was being judged and found wanting because I was viewing things through the lens of an isolated individual. One girl with the whole world on her shoulders—both dangerous and lonely.

One night my husband and I were having dinner with good friends, talking about names. The names of our children and then our own. I confessed that my name reminded me of how judgmental I can be—that it was a source of shame, a spotlight on my true vice. My friend Zach looked at me incredulously. A Georgia boy with the heart of a Jesuit priest, in his Southern drawl Zach told me I had it all wrong. “Your name means God is the judge, not you,” he said. “It means that all the things in the world that make you upset, you can take to God.” If only I could, I said silently to myself. If only I could give back this great weight on my shoulders. If only I could experience a moment of freedom from the cares of the world.

Like many Americans I picked the names of my own children because I liked the way they sounded. They also had literary connections since I am first and foremost a reader. My daughter came first and I named her Ramona, after the books by Beverly Cleary. Both so that she would remember her Portland roots (Cleary was born and raised here) and also because I secretly hoped any daughter of mine would be strong, spunky, and not a typical “good” girl. My Ramona has lived up to her name and then some—for years she refused to read the Ramona Quimby books because she was convinced she was nothing like her (a very Ramona response). But I have been pleasantly surprised at how her name has translated well to our friends and neighbors from other cultures. Spanish-speaking friends immediately recognize her name and so do our friends with Arabic names (Mona is a popular choice for women). Her name rolls easily off the tongue of nearly everyone she meets; her name brings joy to so many.

Then there is my son. Ever since I was a teenager and read C. S. Lewis’ sci-fi space trilogy, I had been taken with the name of his main character, Dr. Ransom. I made up my mind at a very young age that this would be the name of my son if I ever had one. Now I have a little blond Ransom who delights in all that the world has to offer: Pokémon, ladybugs, sprinklers, and vampires. I love his name because I picked it out—but I wasn’t thinking about our wider community. From day one, when we started telling our friends and neighbors what our tiny squishy five-pound baby was named, we got confused looks and scrunched noses. Friends from generational-poverty backgrounds wondered aloud why we didn’t just go ahead and name him “felony” or “misdemeanor.” Friends from non-English language backgrounds stumbled on the new-to-them word. Recently a teenager who was checking in Ransom to children’s church stopped and looked at me. “His name is Ransom?” the teenager asked me, incredulous. “As in, I am going to kidnap your child and hold him for ransom?” “Yes,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Exactly like that.”

I can laugh about it now, but the names we choose and the way we go about this process speaks to the values of our family background and overall culture. I did not think about the greater community or even what the names I gave my children meant. I liked the way they sounded; they pleased me on an individual level and seemed like strong names for the types of nonconforming adults I would hope they would grow into. But the older they get and the more I see a wide array of people interact with them, the more I realize the power of names. They can invite people in, or they can confuse. I never used to understand why the most popular names in the world are all variations on Mohammed, John, Miriam/Maryan/Mary. But now I see the connections to the stories, to the traditions people long to continue on.

When she was three, my daughter told me that she didn’t like her name anymore. She had decided to change it. “My name is Mohammed,” she told me, her face slightly defiant. “No,” I said, “it’s not.” “Yes it is,” she insisted over and over again until I asked her why she wanted to change it. “Because,” she said, “everyone I know is named Mohammed.” I realized then and there how very different a childhood my daughter was having from my own.

Because of our ever-widening circle of neighbors, I realize more and more how our names connect us to stories that are greater than an isolated individual. They speak about family, culture, religion. They carry the threads forward into history, they tie us to one another. I did not think about this when I named my children, and I did not think about this when I felt ashamed of my own name. But slowly, I am starting to see how we can choose to connect with one another, even in the smallest of ways, and the rippling effects of these choices.

Now when my Muslim friends ask me about my name, I have learned to be proud. “Allah is my judge,” I will answer them nonchalantly, and usually they squeal Mashallah! and clap their hands for me, they are so pleased with my good, strong name. They are so happy to find an American with a name that is also oriented toward God, toward the community. And through their delight I have found my own rigid little heart softening. God, the very good judge, the one who loves my friends and neighbors more deeply than I could ever imagine, also loves me.

On the plane I watched my seatmate take the time to carefully paint the view of the clouds outside our window. I was mesmerized, my fingers itching for my own brush. We were quiet for the rest of the flight, both of us trying in our own ways to not think about the metal plane keeping us alive and buoyant, about all of the small disasters that could happen at any moment. Was she painting a miracle or a distraction? I couldn’t decide. I watched her, stroke by stroke, paint what she could see over my shoulder. A world so neatly contained, one I could never touch, and therefore never ruin, with my loving, soiled hands.