My Name is

Lately I've an obsession with thinking and writing about my name. It probably started last spring when I taught a creative nonfiction workshop and spent a week trying to convince students they should be curious about their names as an entry point to where they came from. We read an essay entitled "Being Brians," in which the author, Brian Doyle, researched all the Brian Doyles of the world and found there were about 200 of them. So he wrote them letters and told them who he was, asked them who they were, and used some of their responses for his essay, which was in part intended to speak to something about his individual Brian-ness. It was a brilliant if a bit gimmicky essay, and my students on the whole were unimpressed with it and the assignment. My name is my name, they figured. It is what it is.

There is no way to underscore how much I loathe that attitude, and that phrase: it is what it is. Using it says to your audience, I don't care to think about this matter. There is no explaining it, thus I will assume it doesn't exist. Perhaps I'm jealous because there are very few things in life my brain can easily let go. But also I think it's stupid and careless non-thinking that leads people to buy books like Going Rogue and claim it to be the first book they've read in decades (reported on CNN yesterday--sheesh!).

It cannot be just what it is. It must be more.

But my name obsession actually goes back much further than the time I'm claiming. It was an issue, though not a point of contention, when Brock and I decided to marry. Immediately he said I should stick to who I am, because I had the coolest name he'd ever heard. And I thanked heavens for that, because honestly, whenever I thought of marriage in the abstract in the pre-Brock years, I always told myself that whoever the man might be had damned well better be all right with me keeping my Champagne. This started fights with more than one boyfriend I never would've married anyway. Brock's arrival was the first point in my life when I thought, aw, I could give it up, I could be a Guthrie. And after we were married, when we saw the Avett Brothers in concert (Jen's present to us), and they opened up with the song with those beautiful lines "always remember there is nothing worth sharing, like the love that let us share our name," well, I was ready to flee the building and run to the courthouse to fill out whatever paperwork needed filling to make myself a Brooke Guthrie. But I didn't, and Brock and I are still a unit, still a family, and we can worry about whatever strange hyphenated children we'll have when and if they actually come.

My name. My name is Brooke. As a child it was Brooksita, or Bootie, or Mija, or Ninita. But Brooke was the standard, and to hear it with smaller ears is a bit severe. It always seemed a grown-up name, and one it took years to fit into. I've described it as a quick chop of wood, a cut in the air. If the name had a color it would be blue. If it had a mood it would be glum. The Eeyore of names. The "oo" sound of names.

It could've been longer. My mother, I think, was searching for something mellifluous. But Roy found something ethnic and exasperating with such long flowy names (his mother was Conchetta, straight from Italy--he didn't want another one of her on his hands). He didn't want an ethnic name, he didn't want a Jew name, and when my mother compromised the middle name of Rachel, there wasn't too much eye-rolling because he'd gotten Brooke (and if I was to have a part-Jew name, it was appropriate to relegate it to middle-child status that often goes ignored). Mom liked Brooke too; she was a beloved soap opera character, guileless, graceful, and beautiful. Already so much to live up to.

A name like a cut. My existence in the mouths of those who speak me lasts maybe a quarter of a second, tops. Thank goodness for the oddness of combining the consonant "b" with an "r" and the difficulty it proves for the lips, or else I'd hardly exist at all. I'm thinking now of Gladwell's Outliers, and how Chinese numbers take such a short amount of time to say that speakers can memorize a longer list of numbers at once, thus they can count and work with numbers more easily early in life and thus generally are better at math than their Western counterparts. My Brooke of a name might be an English equivalent of that, so small in sound that it's easily memorable, and if everyone's name had the brevity of my own, we'd be able to memorize many more names than our lexicon of Jennifers and Alexandras are capable of handling (if, after all, remembering the greatest amount of names were to exist or even be mildly interesting).

My recent Facebook status: "I love that my first name is a noun and a verb, and that verb means 'to suffer, to tolerate,' which means that martyrdom is my legacy, as I've always wanted it to be."

There is both truth and untruth to this. I'm not sure if martyrdom is a legacy I desire, but it seems inevitable, and a role well-fitted for me. Day after day I'm becoming monstrously aware of how many roles I'm taking over for Lala. The last time we spoke, for example, she said some things that made me cry. Sweet things, Lala things. And I wept, and wept, and she told me to save those tears for the death of the person who has loved me more than anyone on this earth ever will: for herself. I reminded her about my plan to keep her alive forever, and she said, out of nowhere, that a few years ago her tears just dried right up. She couldn't remember the last time she cried (I could--it was at my wedding).

Although Lala often bends toward the hyperbole, this statement was one I could actually believe in. She doesn't cry much anymore, and I feel like much of my childhood was spent bathing in her tears. Meanwhile I cry all the time now, at least a handful of times per week, and while I hope this isn't a tendency towards martyrdom (after all, I cry for the sweet things most times, and it's become a ritual for me and Brock--he goes out of his way to do something especially kind, and I swear, it can be just washing his own dirty dishes, and I'll weep and he'll feign bashfulness--really it's one of the great games we play), too many tears cannot be good for anyone. I'm not sure if I buy this cleansing business anymore. Crying profusely means one can't be a person in the real world. I've tried it. You leave the house and people think you've been beaten up or something. They can't and shouldn't want to handle you, the open wound. Will you love me, cashier at Winn Dixie? Can you understand the difficulties of being Brooke?

And the cycle obviously perpetuates itself. You get home and think, I've no place in this world! Thus the crying begins again, and at least three more hours must go by before anyone should be allowed to see you (or more specifically me, who looks hideous when she cries. When I was a kid my mom always quoted Bill Pullman from Spaceballs when I threw a fit and cried over nothing, "You are ugly when you're angry." More tears ensued, of course, and mom just laughed. It's sad but true: I am ugly when I'm angry). All over some sweetness between me and my husband, and occasionally a celebrity death, or a closer one.

Luckily it's been weeks since I've felt this, or put poor Aneesha at Winn Dixie in the awkward position of looking at my puffy pink face while scanning my milk and bananas. Am I becoming Lala? Maybe not, because at least I feel guilty for imposing myself on strangers. Lala would think, why shouldn't I, I'm me! It's what's absolutely beautiful and absolutely frightening about her.

(An aside: I'm also becoming her because of her stories: I'm learning only now to tell the ones she's always told, and to make them real, the way she used to. She's bored with stories now; the only ones she'll tell are the ones so absurd I can't even repeat them here, and if she new I'd attributed them to her, she'd say there's no way she ever told them. On another day I'll reiterate my concern that she is truly losing it.)

Combining my first and last names leads to interesting possibilities. Must I suffer champagne, or find myself awash in a river of it (knowing my drinking tendencies, it's obviously the latter). When Brock and I spoke for the first time at an Ivanhoe Street party, he learned my full name and this was the picture in his mind: a brook of champagne, in a world of gauzy pink, where the sun is always at half-mast and alcohol doesn't hurt and only brings joy, a woman made of champagne herself emerges, ready with a glass, leans into the river and fills his cup, and says, "Come see." She is me, the eclipse of a world of hurt. I say "come see," a pair of words he'd never heard before. He took a nip and loved it, never wanting me to be anyone other than who I was. Brooke Champagne. A woman he didn't know he had the right to love.

Ultimately my main job is to Brooke myself. I must suffer who I am daily, and though delighting in being Brooke isn't part of my name's job description, I'll do that too.

Though I won't say I am who I am. Because the deepest answers to who I am I'll never really know, and don't want to. What else will there be, then, to write about?