Mothers and Names

My mother is, and always has been, what you might call a nameophile. She is obsessed with baby names. During my childhood, our favourite game was updating our lists of favourite names for boys and girls. She would get out the baby name book, and we would literally read the whole thing, including all the meanings. I swear we had that thing memorised. I would astonish people by informing them of the meaning of their name when I met them.
One would naturally expect that a mother such as mine would be well-equipped to give her child a name that would transport him (or her) into the upper-echelons of cool: a sexy, powerful, edgy name. But there’s one name that even the most savvy of women like to mess around with, the playground for her quirky side: the middle name. I’m not saying there is or there isn’t some sadistic pay-back involved, but the fact is that this small, screaming person who is now vomiting on the sheets yet again, has just put her through nine months of walking around like a hungry, hormonal whale with a weak bladder, followed by an experience that makes women wish they could just be burned at the stake and have it over with. One can draw their own conclusions.
Whatever the motivation (who can know the mind of a woman with baby-brain?), we end up with middle names like mine- well, “name” is perhaps too generous a description; it’s more of a chemical symbol, really. Fé. With a freaking accent mark. As a child, I tended to use an apostrophe instead, and never knew quite where the mark went or which way it pointed. The only method I know of for getting the accent mark in there when I’m typing is to go through the elaborate process of typing the word café, deleting the first two letters, capitalising the third, and Voila! A nice, neat, two-letter middle name that customs officers, upon inspecting my passport, usually take to mean FE for FEMALE.
“You didn’t have a name when you were born,” Mum would say, “and so you were just called Baby Gillis.” “At least she didn’t leave it at that”, I would think with relief. Gillis was a heavy enough cross for a little girl to bear as a surname, let alone as a first name! The middle-name decision was made on the basis that Fé is the Spanish word for Faith. One little problem with this bright idea: in Spanish, Fé is not a name, just a word. “Spanish” and “Faith”, when taken together, conjure up lovely images of the Inquisition. Nice one, Mum.
At some point, I think my mother began regretting giving me a normal, Australian first name like Kylie. Perhaps it was when that popstar princess began putting my name on the front of every magazine in the newsstands. Maybe she just thought my life was too easy. Whatever the reason, one day, as I was reading a book to my younger sister, Rebecca, and came across a picture of a skyscraper, Mum sighed. “That would have been a nice name for you, Kylie. Sky.” And right then and there, I announced that I was changing my name to Sky. She indulged me, and the alias stuck for about a year. My little copycat sister’s echoing request to change her name to Aeroplane was adamantly refused, however; Mum had standards. Never mind, Rebecca did get to change her name later. When she became ill with meningitis, the nurses in the hospital would call her Blossom. As she recovered, she believed the endearment to be her name, and answered to nothing else. Meanwhile, my mother had taken to using my middle name as if it were my first, the way my American cousins do. So Kylie and Rebecca had become Fé and Blossom. We eventually found our way back into our own names, of course, and I am still tormented by my middle name. When forced by law to use my middle name on some document, I suppress any wild thoughts of purposefully contracting meningitis, and brace myself for the inevitable question: “What’s this? Fee?” “Um… that’s my middle name, Fé. As in, Santa Fé.” I could kiss whoever named that city.