Silly WordPress. I’m not going to tell you what my middle name is. Nice try, FBI agents.
But I can talk about it. I like my middle name, much more than I like my real first name (as you’ve surely guessed, “Mith” is not my given name; I have certain beef with my real first name). My middle name is easier to say, and I think it suits me better than my first name ever did. Also, on my very first date with my now-husband, I asked if he could guess my middle name, and he guessed it correctly on the first try with no hints, which was wild, especially considering we’d also just figured out that we had the exact same birthday (four years apart).
And my middle name does have a significance that perhaps I can share. It was the name of my mother’s aunt, of whom I have no memory because she died when I was a tiny baby. But I always felt a sort of kinship with her, growing up, because she was a painter, and I used to fancy myself an “artist,” all the way up until approximately age 21 or 22, at which point I was in art school and surrounded by actual artists, comparing my work to theirs in drawing studio classes, and I finally realized that I wasn’t shit, that I simply didn’t have the eye, the motivation, or the patience to ever be a real artist. I may like to doodle and dabble, but I’m not the real thing. So, I gave up on that dream, and switched my major to writing. Whether or not I’m any better at that is still up for debate.
But as a child everyone told me I was so good at drawing, and all through high school and my first years of college I thought of myself as an artist, so, I felt a sort of bond with my namesake great-aunt, whose hand-painted China adorned our mantelpiece and filled our shelves. She painted beautiful, realistic things like birds and flowers, and had a real eye for decoration. Unlike me, lol. My style was always more cartoony and fantastic.
My favorite thing that this great-aunt made, though, was not the fine China or the ornate painted clock, but a fabric ball. I’m not sure what it was or how better to describe it. It was a lightweight, hollow ball, like papier-mache or something, the size of a large grapefruit, and its outside was coated with a haphazard patchwork of glued-on fabric scraps in a rainbow of colors and patterns. It hung on a piece of red yarn like an oversized Christmas ornament. I kept it in my room when I was a kid, and found it very sensorily pleasing, and often just held it and played with it. My bedroom theme as a small child was rainbows and bright colors (even at age four and five, I was never very feminine), so the ball matched the aesthetic perfectly. I don’t know what ever became of that ball, and can’t remember the last time I saw it.
The name of this great-aunt was also given, in part, to my own Mom, whose full name is an amalgamation of two of her aunts’. (This is tricky to talk about without telling you the names, lol.) But so I’ve always loved this name of my Mom’s; it’s super uncommon, and feels very poetic. I’ve never seen another person with that name IRL, only in poems and books.
And here is a funny coincidence. Much later, when I was 30 and had my first daughter, I unintentionally gave her a first name that is almost exactly the middle name of this namesake aunt of mine (same root, just a couple different vowels). All this time, I didn’t even know what the aunt’s middle name was.
My daughter’s first name is very special to me. I’d been secretly saving it since I was sixteen, when I heard it in a film, and tucked it away in my heart for years, wishing for a little girl that I could give that name to, whispering it to myself and writing it in journals, envisioning her in my imagination. For her middle name, I wanted to use my Mom’s name – the poetic one that is an amalgamation of her two aunts’. But so I didn’t realize until my daughter was a couple months old that I’d accidentally given her a family name for her first name as well. So my firstborn is basically completely named after this same namesake great-aunt of mine. If I were still superstitious, like I used to be before I became religious, I’d think it was more than just a coincidence. That my bond with this great-aunt lived on.
On that note, I also think it’s cool that this name has a specifically Christian meaning. And it was my name even before I was Christian. It felt weirdly prophetic. Not that I live up to the name or anything, lol, but, I keep trying.
MiTHology (4.0) 